Session Abstract

Narrative strategies have been a critical element in the diagnostic, therapeutic, and dissemination techniques of medical histories. How do narratives inform, explain, or complicate our understandings of the medical world? What do medical narratives reveal about the fabrics of state and civil societies? In its broadest interests, our panel explores the public work of stories and how they operate between the medical and social world. We explore the ways texts use narrative representations to convey medical knowledge about people, places, and power in the Brazil, the Philippines, the South Atlantic and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within this framing rubric, we examine the uses of stories in the construction of political and moral agencies in medical episodes and the effects of stories on varied cultural ethics. The legal historian and literary theorist Karla F.C. Holloway formulates a tripartite “cultural ethics” as 1) a methodology, 2) an acknowledgment of the exchange between subject and subjectivity through literary texts, and 3) as methodology and particular attention to narrative as text. For Holloway, “private bodies and public texts produce a relationship between cartography, desire and the body” (70) that come together through specific locative guides from family trees, genealogies and maps. Our panel locates medical narratives as one specific type of cultural ethics that is simultaneously a public text and a praxis. As a public text, medical narratives can yield collective and social understanding about health and illness. It can illuminate seemingly private aspects of medical protocol and procedures such as confinement, segregation and quarantine while allowing us to diagnose particular cultural, economic and social conditions from the texts being inspected. Our panel looks at four examples of medical narratives that bring legibility to the lives of patients and physicians: British doctors who cared for Africans rescued from slave ships at the island of Saint Helena; the published reports of J. Marion Sims’ earliest vesico-vaginal fistula trials in Montgomery, Alabama during the mid-19^th century; crônicas that often featured madmen/women in late 19^th and early 20^th century Brazil, and; autobiographies of physicians who encountered leprosy in the Philippines during the period of American colonization spanning the first half of the 20^th century. What do these specific types of narratives tell us about the particular medical conditions they portray? If cultural ethics, as Holloway claims, interrogates the discipline’s subject, how do each of these narrative types simultaneously contain and constrain the message they are trying to communicate? How do we approach, confront or encounter these various texts and the events they contain as literature, personal memory or medical records?