Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine in Bloomington, MN

Communicating Disease focuses on the intersections of literature and medicine. It unravels the intricate entanglement of culture and disease and is devoted to the representation of life through medical narratives, exploring its value to both the literary critic and the medical practitioner. Grouped in four sections, the contributions to this volume discuss cultural representations of medical practice, the medical profession, diseases and epidemics, and potential healing functions of narratives. Topics range from eighteenth-century Old and New World practices of medicine via the careers of nineteenth-century women doctors and nurses subverting dominant gender norms, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cognitive sciences; from smallpox epidemics via yellow fever to AIDS and biotechnology; from Alice James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Siri Hustvedt and Richard Powers as well as women pathologists on the screen; to be concluded by a transnational reading of the world of medicine in the medium of literature.