Catherine Belling
Biographic Data
| ID | 5703496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Belling |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Belling |
| SIGNATURE | BELLING C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stony Brook University |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-1713-2911 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Forgetting Forwards
an interview that "when I saw Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah, I walked out in the middle of the movie during the rape scene. . . .It took me 10 years to rewatch the movie." 1 No's own film Irrversible (2002) contains a rape scene that may surpass Peckinpah's in the intensity of its effect on audiences.Asked why people remember the rape more than anything else in his film, he offers a preliminary trauma theory: "Violence generates adrenaline, and adr…
Ouch
The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression an…
Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018)
Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018) Catherine Belling (bio) I find my present position here in 2022 a strange one from which to think back on my time editing Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018, years both catastrophic and oddly empty. I must now read the issues I edited through the intervening retrospective lens of 2020. People joke about "the before times," but they're not wrong. 2020 is an especially distorting lens, in part…
Ghost Meat
The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are t…
Facing Death
The usefulness and limitations of dignity as a guide to clinical end-of-life decision-making lie in the challenge it poses to the bioethical principle of autonomy, individualist self-determination that can resist others' expectations. I propose understanding dignity as performative and thus mutual rather than autonomous, requiring witnesses and a feedback loop of representation, reception, and reinterpretation that, crucially, persists after the …
Reading like an Editor
Reading like an Editor: A Farewell Note Catherine Belling (bio) “Farewell” is the usual title for this genre, the final editorial from a departing editor, but I use it uncomfortably, wanting to say “Wait, I’m not going anywhere—and anyway I’ve already gone.” I stepped down as editor at the end of 2018, and I thank Anne Hudson Jones for serving as interim editor for 2019 and for steering the journal’s transition to some important changes, describe…
Editor’s Foreword
Editor’s ForewordA Year of Frankenstein Catherine Belling No silence so deep as this place with its cargo of newly dead. Only the slow drip of water over stone. . . . He ties each knot down until the edges are apposed. Not too tightly. These are the most meticulous sutures of his life. —Richard Selzer, “Imelda” Last week I read Richard Selzer’s story “Imelda” with a group of second-year medical students. We talked about the strangeness of a centr…
Introduction
Introduction: From Bioethics and Humanities to Biohumanities? Catherine Belling Bioethics may have been invented in June 1816, two hundred years ago this month, when a seventeen-year-old woman began to write her first novel. Spending her summer in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley, the celebrities of the British Romantic movement, Mary Shelley took the myth of Prometheus so central to her husband’s work and retold it as …
In Memoriam Richard Selzer (1928–2016)
In Memoriam Richard Selzer (1928–2016) Catherine Belling It may be difficult, now that so many physicians write with such success about their work, to appreciate the significance of what the surgeon Richard Selzer did when he decided to take up literary writing. While he is of course the descendant of an extensive line of clinician-writers—like Chekhov, Bulgakov, Williams—he was, from his start in horror stories, interested less in clinical situa…
The President's Glands
In the biographical novel American Adulterer, physician Jed Mercurio recounts President Kennedy's life as the story of a sick body. This experiment and its reception expose biofiction's conventional assumptions regarding human interiority and reveal alternative, bodily interiors, knowable largely through medical discourse, which work as the biographical novel's biological referents
Sacred Cursing
Sacred Cursing: In Memoriam, Dannie Abse (1923–2014) Catherine Belling Dannie Abse, Welsh physician, poet, and for many years a Literature and Medicine contributing editor, died this fall, aged 91. Thirty years ago, when Abse was featured in an issue of the journal on physician-writers, editor William Claire called him “the finest and most diversified writing physician now working in the English language.”1 Abse, who studied medicine at the Unive…
Begin with a Text
A happy doctor's escape from narrative
The humanities have, in their application to medicine, become almost synonymous with narrative. When medical education turned to 'reflection' as a means to nurture coherent and ethical professional identity, interventions tended to take narrative as their primary form. Even while promoting 'mindfulness' as complete engagement in the present moment, proponents of reflection sometimes subsume reflection under the category 'narrative'. The author of…
Overwhelming the Medium
Few illness narratives have been published about the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. This essay links this silence to representational problems posed by mass trauma that happened before response to the Holocaust began our present era of attention to the narrative testimonies of suffering. In a pandemic, the collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over the particular and subjective. History tu…
Hypochondriac Hermeneutics
This essay considers hypochondria not as a psychiatric diagnosis but as a hermeneutic position: a consequence of attending to the uncertainty of being an embodied human; an anxious skepticism; a resistance to reassurance based on an arguably too-close reading of body and self. Medicine commonly rejects such interpretation in order to reduce the potential proliferation of meaning to those signs it can interpret in diagnostically and therapeuticall…
The Purchase of Fruitfulness
Microbiography and Resistance in the Human Culture Medium
Writing at the very beginning of the antibiotic era, Hans Zinsser observed signs of bacterial resistance to human efforts at fighting disease. He identified a rise in "excessively toxic and deadly" strains of diphtheria in response to "modern bacteriological methods" such as vaccination with serum antitoxin (p.67). This observation leads him to try to recount the control of epidemic disease from a perspective wider than that of a single human gen…
Reading The Operation
Belling queries the accessibility of medical knowledge to non- medical audiences by examining the construction of medical realism represented in the documentary show called The Operation. Considering an episode in which the patient is being treated for endometriosis with laparoscopic surgery, Belling creates a scenario in which an imaginary viewer watches the episode. By imagining how the viewer might use the documentary to inform her own medical…
No prominent works on this page.
Reading The Operation
Belling queries the accessibility of medical knowledge to non- medical audiences by examining the construction of medical realism represented in the documentary show called The Operation. Considering an episode in which the patient is being treated for endometriosis with laparoscopic surgery, Belling creates a scenario in which an imaginary viewer watches the episode. By imagining how the viewer might use the documentary to inform her own medical…
Microbiography and Resistance in the Human Culture Medium
Writing at the very beginning of the antibiotic era, Hans Zinsser observed signs of bacterial resistance to human efforts at fighting disease. He identified a rise in "excessively toxic and deadly" strains of diphtheria in response to "modern bacteriological methods" such as vaccination with serum antitoxin (p.67). This observation leads him to try to recount the control of epidemic disease from a perspective wider than that of a single human gen…
The Purchase of Fruitfulness
Hypochondriac Hermeneutics
This essay considers hypochondria not as a psychiatric diagnosis but as a hermeneutic position: a consequence of attending to the uncertainty of being an embodied human; an anxious skepticism; a resistance to reassurance based on an arguably too-close reading of body and self. Medicine commonly rejects such interpretation in order to reduce the potential proliferation of meaning to those signs it can interpret in diagnostically and therapeuticall…
Overwhelming the Medium
Few illness narratives have been published about the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. This essay links this silence to representational problems posed by mass trauma that happened before response to the Holocaust began our present era of attention to the narrative testimonies of suffering. In a pandemic, the collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over the particular and subjective. History tu…
A happy doctor's escape from narrative
The humanities have, in their application to medicine, become almost synonymous with narrative. When medical education turned to 'reflection' as a means to nurture coherent and ethical professional identity, interventions tended to take narrative as their primary form. Even while promoting 'mindfulness' as complete engagement in the present moment, proponents of reflection sometimes subsume reflection under the category 'narrative'. The author of…
Begin with a Text
Sacred Cursing
Sacred Cursing: In Memoriam, Dannie Abse (1923–2014) Catherine Belling Dannie Abse, Welsh physician, poet, and for many years a Literature and Medicine contributing editor, died this fall, aged 91. Thirty years ago, when Abse was featured in an issue of the journal on physician-writers, editor William Claire called him “the finest and most diversified writing physician now working in the English language.”1 Abse, who studied medicine at the Unive…
The President's Glands
In the biographical novel American Adulterer, physician Jed Mercurio recounts President Kennedy's life as the story of a sick body. This experiment and its reception expose biofiction's conventional assumptions regarding human interiority and reveal alternative, bodily interiors, knowable largely through medical discourse, which work as the biographical novel's biological referents
Introduction
Introduction: From Bioethics and Humanities to Biohumanities? Catherine Belling Bioethics may have been invented in June 1816, two hundred years ago this month, when a seventeen-year-old woman began to write her first novel. Spending her summer in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley, the celebrities of the British Romantic movement, Mary Shelley took the myth of Prometheus so central to her husband’s work and retold it as …
In Memoriam Richard Selzer (1928–2016)
In Memoriam Richard Selzer (1928–2016) Catherine Belling It may be difficult, now that so many physicians write with such success about their work, to appreciate the significance of what the surgeon Richard Selzer did when he decided to take up literary writing. While he is of course the descendant of an extensive line of clinician-writers—like Chekhov, Bulgakov, Williams—he was, from his start in horror stories, interested less in clinical situa…
Editor’s Foreword
Editor’s ForewordA Year of Frankenstein Catherine Belling No silence so deep as this place with its cargo of newly dead. Only the slow drip of water over stone. . . . He ties each knot down until the edges are apposed. Not too tightly. These are the most meticulous sutures of his life. —Richard Selzer, “Imelda” Last week I read Richard Selzer’s story “Imelda” with a group of second-year medical students. We talked about the strangeness of a centr…
Reading like an Editor
Reading like an Editor: A Farewell Note Catherine Belling (bio) “Farewell” is the usual title for this genre, the final editorial from a departing editor, but I use it uncomfortably, wanting to say “Wait, I’m not going anywhere—and anyway I’ve already gone.” I stepped down as editor at the end of 2018, and I thank Anne Hudson Jones for serving as interim editor for 2019 and for steering the journal’s transition to some important changes, describe…
Facing Death
The usefulness and limitations of dignity as a guide to clinical end-of-life decision-making lie in the challenge it poses to the bioethical principle of autonomy, individualist self-determination that can resist others' expectations. I propose understanding dignity as performative and thus mutual rather than autonomous, requiring witnesses and a feedback loop of representation, reception, and reinterpretation that, crucially, persists after the …
Ghost Meat
The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are t…
Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018)
Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018) Catherine Belling (bio) I find my present position here in 2022 a strange one from which to think back on my time editing Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018, years both catastrophic and oddly empty. I must now read the issues I edited through the intervening retrospective lens of 2020. People joke about "the before times," but they're not wrong. 2020 is an especially distorting lens, in part…
Ouch
The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression an…
Forgetting Forwards
an interview that "when I saw Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah, I walked out in the middle of the movie during the rape scene. . . .It took me 10 years to rewatch the movie." 1 No's own film Irrversible (2002) contains a rape scene that may surpass Peckinpah's in the intensity of its effect on audiences.Asked why people remember the rape more than anything else in his film, he offers a preliminary trauma theory: "Violence generates adrenaline, and adr…
Art (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Literature (13 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Empathy and Medical Education (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · History (8 works) · Psychoanalysis (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works)