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A brief history of "Illness narratives"
1. Illness Narratives:
A Brief History
Trisha Paul
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under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
2. What are illness
narratives?
“Expressions about or around the experience of being ill”
Can take many forms
Art
Film
Dance
Literature
Can be told from a variety of different perspectives
Health professionals
Loved ones
Those with illness
3. Disease vs. Illness
Distinction coined by sociologist Arthur Kleinman
(1988) in Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and
the Human Condition
Disease
Pathological and biological condition
Primary concern of medicine
Rooted in the physical body
Illness
“Innately human experience of symptoms and
suffering” (1)
Social and cultural effects of living with disease
Personal and subjective experience of illness
4. Where did they come
from?
Illness narratives surfaced in the 1970s
Factors that contributed to increased illness
narratives
Evolution of medicine
Evolution of narrative
5. Evolution of Medicine
Technology advances
Progression of scientific research
Growing emphasis on treating the ‘disease’ in
medicine
Bodily disorder privileged
Increased medicalization of death
Death moves from the comfort of one’s home to
the hospital setting
6. Evolution of Narrative
Until 1950s, autobiography as accurate and
undisputable account of the cohesive self
1960s: self as socially and culturally constructed,
begins to disrupt traditional autobiographical
representations
1970s: autobiography increasingly focuses on
the self in discord
Increasingly embraced by women’s studies,
ethnic studies, African American studies,
Holocaust studies
Method of giving voice to the experiences of
marginalized populations
7. Emergence of
Pathographies
Literary scholar Anne Hunsaker Hawkins (1999)
in Reconstructing Illness: Studies in
Pathographies
“autobiographical or biographical narrative about
an experience of illness” (229)
Narratives arose in response to the increased
medicalization of illness
Patient empowerment through expression
8. Illness Narratives Today
How do you think the genre may have evolved
over the years?
What are some of the current controversies
surrounding illness narratives today?
Keeping in mind Frank’s illness narrative
categories, how do you think the kinds of
narratives we tell might have changed, if at all?
9. Works Cited
Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the
Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness:
Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue UP, 1993.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives:
Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition.
New York: Basic, 1988. Print.