Abstract
Martha A. Hall’s artists’ books documenting her experience of living with breast cancer offer future health professionals a unique opportunity to sit in the patient’s position of vulnerability and fear. Hall’s books have become a cornerstone of our medical humanities pedagogy at the Maine Women Writers Collection because of their emotional directness and their impact on readers. This essay examines the ways that Hall’s call for conversation with healthcare providers is enacted at the University of New England and provides a model for how such works might be used at other educational institutions to encourage empathy between practitioners and patients by engaging in conversations about anger, fear, and other common reactions to life-threatening illness. We explore the unruly nature of Martha A. Hall’s narratives of illness and care, as well as how the form of the books themselves engages the reader in a deep relationship with Hall’s personal pain and her humanity itself. We explore, too, the cumulative effect of these powerful books on readers who handle them regularly, as we do in our roles as professor and archivist.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Stella Bolaki and the University of Kent for envisioning and bringing about the 2016 “Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities” symposium, which the Maine Women Writers Collection was honored to cosponsor. We would also like to thank Alan Hall for permission to quote from the letters students sent to Martha.
Endnotes
1 Here and elsewhere, we have reproduced students’ letters without corrections, altering them only to insert bracketed information for the sake of clarity.
2 For a detailed analysis of The Rest of My Life II, see Bolaki’s essay in this special issue.
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Tuttle, J.S., Miller, C. Unruly Voices: Artists’ Books and Humanities Archives in Health Professions Education. J Med Humanit 41, 53–64 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09599-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09599-1