Event Details

Medicine, Culture and Society seminar

Literature and medicine: a “whole” story?

In this talk, I’ll trace the surprising genealogy of an idea with deep roots in contemporary humanist attitudes towards medicine: that literature, and the tools of literature, can make people “whole” again. Born from a Romantic-era fusion between aesthetics and natural philosophy, and carried into academic medicine during the 20^th century, this therapeutic holism has troubling implications for medical practices that employ literary tools (e.g., narrative medicine). Not only does the metaphor of wholeness delimit the ways people can be well, it sets a treacherously high bar for literary therapy—a bar it’s unlikely to clear.

But if literature can’t make people whole again, what can it do, therapeutically? The answer is: lots. And we can look to Romantic writers who lived through the ascendance of therapeutic holism, like Mary Shelley and John Keats, for guidance on the myriad ways literature comforts, challenges, and sustains us through pain.

Brittany Pladek is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA). Her research interests include literature and medicine, Romanticism, poetics, and speculative fiction. Her monograph, The Poetics of Palliation, appeared with Liverpool UP in 2019.



No registration needed, click on this link to join us at 2pm