Danielle Spencer's Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity is a landmark and deeply imaginative contribution to work at the interfaces of biomedicine, psychiatry, humanities, literature, popular culture, cultural studies, disability studies, memoir, and personal narrative. It fills an important niche in the interdisciplinary domains of health humanities, medical humanities, and narrative medicine and is a welcome contribution to these fields. Indeed, I think we can see it as a "next generation" diffraction of those fields as they move from exploring interdisciplinary connections toward making confident discoveries and assertions of their own. Spencer writes much of the book in the first person as she explores her own experiences with extraordinary vision, medical diagnostic categories, surgical procedures, critical theory, and narrative medicine. She brings extensive scholarship to the process informed by her role as academic director of the Columbia University narrative medicine master's program and as co-author of The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Metagnosis is thus not only a lively and enjoyable read; it is an education and masterclass in the uses of literature and humanities for understanding and navigating health, health care, and embodied identity more broadly.
展开▼
