Strange cases: Medical case histories and British fiction.
Item
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Title
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Strange cases: Medical case histories and British fiction.
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Identifier
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AAI9959239
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identifier
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9959239
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Creator
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Tougaw, Jason Daniel.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | History of Science | Health Sciences, Medicine and Surgery
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Abstract
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The novel and the case history are analogous in structure, theme, and evolution. Fiction from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in diagnosis. In the process of representing pathologies like breast cancer, monomania, consumption, hypochondria and hysteria, addiction, and sexual inversion in extraordinary detail, both genres establish an affective relationship between reader and narrator, whom they link though their mutual sympathy for the suffering narrative subject. That affective relationship enables the author to present the text as a vital social document and to justify the representation of extreme, often perverse, states of mind and body. Diagnosis and sympathy, fundamental rhetorics in both the novel and the case history, have had a tremendous influence on twentieth-century psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity. After Freud the self is perpetually subject to diagnosis and relations between selves sustained through modes of sympathy like desire, identification, and transference.;The fundamental difference between the two genres is that the former's subjects are always fictive, literally nobody (to borrow Catherine Gallagher's term) while the latter's are always somebody, based in reality. While fiction produces medical subjects from the raw data of suffering people, fiction incorporates the pathologizing gaze of medicine, chronicling the diagnosis and development of pathology rather than the education of protagonists. In individual chapters I illustrate the ways that writers in both genres use diagnosis and sympathy as mutually reinforcing narrative frames: breast cancers cases and Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767) and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801); hypochondria cases and Jane Austen's fiction; experiments with altered states and Victorian sensation fiction; and intersubjectivity in Henry James and Sigmund Freud. The epilogue is a survey of recent writing by physicians---Arthur Kleinman, Oliver Sacks, Jay Katz, Atul Gawande, and Antonio R. Damasio---that focuses on the sotries of patients alongside late-twentieth-century autobiographical accounts of pathology and illness, including Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and David B. Feinberg's Queer and Loathing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
