Rethinking “Patient Testimony” in the Medical Humanities: The Case of Schizophrenia Bulletin ‘s First Person Accounts’

摘要

Illness narratives are the object par excellence of classical medical humanities enquiry. Thanks in part to the wider 'narrative turn' in the humanities and social science (Bamberg), interest in narratives of/and illness has been growing steadily across a number of fields (Woods, "The Limits of Narrative"), including medical anthropology (Mattingly and Garro; Littlewood), medical sociology (Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Atkinson "Illness Narratives Revisited"), and the philosophy of psychiatry (Fulford et al.). While the medical humanities draw energy and insight from this work, they are perhaps distinctive in bringing social-scientific and literary- philosophical approaches if not together then at least into conversation. Medical humanities researchers with training in the social sciences typically view illness narratives as data to be solicited through interviews and then transcribed, 'coded' and analysed using rigorous methodologies, many of which are aided by sophisticated computer programmes. As the field widens to include work that is more critically and politically engaged (Atkinson et al.; B. E. Lewis), temporal and spatial situatedness, and the complex interplay between 'individual' and 'collective' narratives of illness (Atkinson and Rubinelli), are also coming into focus. A second stream of medical humanities researchers trained in literary and cultural studies approach the study of illness narrative from a different perspective and so with different tools. Here, textual and intertextual, aesthetic and historical detail come sharply into focus, with close- readings of lengthy and polished autobiographical, biographical and fictional accounts of illness teasing out the complexities of these projected worlds (Belling; Ingram et al). Where these divergent approaches to illness narrative might otherwise remain largely indifferent to each other's existence, their intersection in the field of medical humanities affirms shared interests in treating the messy and complex subjective experience of illness as something distinct from the biological functioning of disease, and so in ensuring that these experiences and the ways we come to communicate them are given the recognition they deserve