From narrative medicine to 'maladic literature'

Abstract

This essay analyses studies on narrative medicine and illness narratives. Paragliola reviews the research around the field of narrative medicine through the contributions made by Rita Charon, Stefano Calabrese
and Stefania Polvani, to then focus on the interpretation of the realm of ‘illness in literature’. As the famous writer Virginia Wolf notes, until the nineteen thirties, the study of illness narratives was fairly unchartered territory. The literature of the “neurotic century” gives way, fifty years later, to characters whose mental degeneration is also linked to the physical body. In
fact, in the 1980s, tuberculosis, AIDS and cancer patients were at the centre of a famous study by Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor). From that point on there was a proliferation of seminars, conferences and volumes on the theme of illness narratives in Italian literature. Wide diachronic paths, such as those represented by the editorial collection Le muse di Ippocrate curated
by Daniela De Liso, Valeria Merola and Sebastiano Valerio. The aforementioned books were accompanied by more specific research such as those on old age and cognitive decline by Hanna Serkowska and Paola Villani. This has, in turn, been followed by very recent studies about autopathographies: first-person narratives on the ‘diseased self ’.