Introduction
In 1978 American cultural critic Susan Sontag drew public attention to the language of warfare and heroics used to describe our relationship with illness. We “fight” disease, “battle” cancer, “beat the beast”, and “destroy” cells. Sontag asserted that “… every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology” (Sontag and Broun 1977). The cultural observation of illness as combat is most transparent in the metaphor of hero journey; it is used to conceptualize and narrate stages of sickness and suffering, and to explain and understand encounters and events in medical practice (Woods 2012; Frank 2013).
Scholarship on hero journeys in healthcare takes two main directions: medical professional as hero; and hero concepts in illness journeys. Foundational interpretations of these two domains, occurring at various intersections of humanities and social sciences, are described here. They are yet to be drawn together in a...
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Notes
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Narrative medicine is concerned with illness as it is represented by patients, as it is communicated between health professionals through referrals, charts, and clinical reports, and as it is recalled in practitioners’ reflections of medical practice.
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Lamprell, K. (2023). Healthcare Hero Journeys. In: Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17125-3_89-1
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