Finding Deborah
Centering Patients and Placing Emotion in the History of Disease
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4176284 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Courtney E Thompson (Mississippi State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 826-829 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/712236 |
| OpenAlex | W3118414997 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Works like Rothman’s that center the patient through the illness narrative help us to disaggregate this data, turning statistics into people. The compelling aspect of illness narratives is that they are “intimate, emotive, and deeply personal” (pp. 1–2).9 Recovering the experiences of individuals as flawed, imperfectly human, even unlikable—finding the Deborahs in our histories—helps us to avoid the trap of constructing idealized, stereotyped avatars of invalidism. Likable or unlikable, sympathetic or unsympathetic, what is essential is making our historical actors real, thinking, feeling people. This process is crucial to knowing the disease, in both the past and the present. As one journalist observed, regarding obituaries, “When you read the stories about those who have died during the pandemic, the stories become ... more individualized and expansively larger.”10
Aesthetics · Art · Disease · Emotive · Epistemology · Feeling · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History of Emotions Research · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|