Abstract
This essay recognizes that the interactions that define medical care are problematic and that narrative is invoked to overcome these strains. Being grounded in science, medicine, too, might be influenced by a particular world-view that arose in the natural philosophy of the Scientific Revolution. If narrative responds to this sort of medicine, it may retain traces of this mindset. A feminist approach responds to this viewpoint and may used beneficially to analyze both the story of medicine and the stories within medicine. Tensions discussed from this perspective are those between sickness and health and those between patient and provider; also questioned are suitable form(s) of narrative and whose narratives are valued. Suggestions for broadening narrative to address these issues include letting the body speak for itself, overcoming the power differential in the patient/provider interaction and using standpoints to foster a more equal and just medical system.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anzaldua, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Franciso:Aunt Lute Press.
Bartels, Emily. 2009. “Outside the Box: Surviving Survival.” Literature and Medicine 28 (2): 237–252.
Benatar, Soloman B., Donald M. Berwick et al. 1999. “A Shared Statement of Ethical Principles for Those Who Shape and Give Health Care.” Ann. Internal Med. 130 (2): 134–147.
Bernard, Claude. 1957. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. New York: Dover Publications.
Bordieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bordo, Susan. 1999. “Selections from The Flight to Objectivity.” In Feminist Interpretation of Rene Descartes, edited by Susan Bordo, 48–69. University Park PA: Penn State University Press.
Burney, Fanny, 1811. “Olde Tyme Mastectomy.” Accessed on May 19, 2013. http://wesclark.com/jw/mastectomy.html.
Charon, Rita. 2006a. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2006b. “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession and Trust.” Journal of the American Medical Association 286:1897–1902.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. “Comment on ‘Hekman’s Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power?” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra Harding, 103–126. New York and London: Routledge.
Dackerman, Susan. 2011. Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.
DasGupta, Sayantani, 2008. “The Art of Medicine: Narrative Humility.” The Lancet 371:980–981.
Das Gupta, Sayantani and Marcia Hurst. 2007. Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. Kent, OH: Kent University Press.
DeShazer, Mary K. 2009. “Cancer Narratives and an Ethics of Commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Liebovitz and David Rieff.” Literature and Medicine 28:215–236.
Duden, Barbara. 1991. The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Dierdre English. 2005. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Books.
Farmer, Paul. 2003. Patholgies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Unuversity of California Press.
Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Vintage Books.
Frank, Arthur. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller; Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago and NY: Chicago University Press.
Frosch, D. 2012. “Authoritarian Physicians and Patients’ Fear of Being Labeled Difficult.” Health Affairs 31:1030–1038.
Garden, Rebecca. 2007. “The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities.” New Literary History 38:551–567.
Green, Monica. 2008. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greenhalgh, Trisha and Brian Hurwitz. 1999. “Why Study Narrative?” British Medical Journal 318: 48–50.
Halpern, Jodi. 2003. “What is Clinical Empathy?” J. Gen. Inter. Med. 18:670-674.
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge; Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York and London: Routledge.
———. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and London: Routledge.
Helle, Anita. 2011. “When the Photograph Speaks.” Literature and Medicine 29:297–324.
Hess, David J. 1997. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Holmes, Frederick L. 1967. “Origins of the Concept of the Milieu Interieur.” In Claude Bernard and Experimental Medicine, edited by Francisco Grande and Maurice B. Visscher, 179–191. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc.
Hubbard, Ruth. 1990. The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Judson, Horace F. 1979. The Eighth Day of Creation; The Makers of the Revolution in Biology. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kagan, H. Lee. 2012. “E.R.: Port-au-Prince.” New York Times Magazine, January 15, 58.
Kay, Lily E. 1993. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of the New Biology. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Keller, Evelyn F. 1985. Reflections on Gender and Science. New York and New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 1992. Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. New York and London: Routledge.
———. 1995. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2000. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1988. Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Liebovitz, Annie. 2006. A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005. New York: Random House.
Lorde, Audrey. 1980. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books.
Mackenzie, Catriona. 2010. “Conceptions of Autonomy and Conceptions of the Body in Bioethics.” In Feminist Bioethics: At the Center, On the Margins, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laura E. Baldwin-Ragaven and Petya Fitzpatrick, 71–90. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper and Row.
Morris, David B. 1991. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Proctor, Robert N. 1995. Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer. New York: Basic Books.
Qualtere-Burcher, Paul. 2009. “The Just Distance: Narrativity, Singularity and Relationality as the Source of a New Biomedical Principal.” The Journal of Clinical Ethics 20:299–308.
Rieff, David, 2008. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Shapin, Steven, 1996. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.
Shapin, Steven and S. Schaeffer. 1989. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1990. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador.
Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books.
Tervalon, Melanie and Jann Murray-Garcia. 1998. “Cultural Humility versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education.” J. Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 9:117–235.
Virtanen, Reino, 1960. Claude Bernard and His Place in the History of Ideas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wear, Delese and Julie M. Altman. 2005. “The Limits of Narrative: Medical Student Resistance to Confronting Inequality and Oppression in Literature and Beyond. Medical Education 39:1056–1065.
Acknowledgments
The author acknowledges the kind and cogent comments of David Bleich and Laura Ackerman Smoller.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lederman, M. Social and Gendered Readings of Illness Narratives. J Med Humanit 37, 275–288 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9289-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9289-1