Medicine, Illness, and Children: A Literary Perspective
Feng, Mallory and Maienschein, Jane
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
Medical writings (or literature) are works of either fiction or nonfiction by physicians, patients, or observers about medicine, health, disease, and death. They serve numerous purposes: giving information and thus furthering understanding of medicine and its relationship to society through different perspectives or voices; revealing problems or ethical dilemmas in the healthcare system and thus providing an impetus for health policy change; serving as a conversation between the readers, writers, and characters in the story, and through this conversation increasing readers’ narrative competence (ability to understand and react to stories), mental flexibility, adaptability, and empathy; and finally, allowing people to reflect more deeply on what it means to be human and what disease and life really mean, and possibly invoking healing through this process. By examining the canon of medical writings chronologically, we are able to see changes through time in perceptions of medicine (by doctors, the ill, observers), the role different players have in the healing process, attitudes of and toward different groups giving or receiving care, as well as purposes served by medical writings. We include in the “canon” of medical writings both “classic” texts (that withstood the ‘test of time’), as well as modern narratives, using various published anthologies, databases like http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/, syllabi from courses taught about literature and medicine, and journals like Literature and Medicine as the sources of works. While the canon of medical literature is vast, the focus of this thesis is on one questionCwhen did the cultural shift in Western thought toward children (and the ill child in particular) occur? Different scholars (Aries, Benzaquen, Hawkins) have attributed the shift from a "resigned" to a more "devoted" view of children to different centuries—17th, 18th, or 19th—and have also associated the change to advances in medicine or altered doctors’ roles. In order to determine when the "cultural shift" occurred more specifically, we will examine literature of these centuries that depict the ill child and compare the portrayals of children between centuries. Further, we will look at chronologically parallel changes in medicine to better understand the relationship between this shift and those occurring in the field of medicine.