The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities

Abstract

This Special Collection focuses on the ‘pathological body’ in literature, from the socio-cultural anxieties around the human body to the sick body’s relationship with language(s) and translation. The six articles—from Italian, German, Spanish, French literatures—explore posthuman female body-subjectivity; catalepsy as a framework to reorient traditional gender narratives; the violence of maintaining a socially acceptable subjecthood; the body as language in creating identity; the emotional-psychological coupled with the environment; and translation as an epistemic category. The concept of the ‘pathological body’ arose from the professionalisation of European medicine from the mid-1800s, and literary texts and medical theories travelled across national boundaries in a mutually reinforcing interconnection that globally positioned bourgeois masculinity at the top of a medical-humanistic hierarchy. This Introduction calls for the collaboration of European Modern Languages scholars to begin undoing the consequent harmful models. Understanding that medical paradigms are formed through credible stories, the first section highlights literature as an activist (Thornber, 2013) and ethical site of knowledge that can deconstruct an apparently immutable medical narrative. Section II gives an historical overview of the rise of clinical medicine and its creation of the idealised man and woman, and examines the repercussions of not fulfilling these normative categories. Section III discusses the overlap of nineteenth-century scientific and literary texts, and the danger of translating ‘sickly’ texts. Section IV notes the signal importance of language and considers how non-normative and racialised identities can ‘write back’ against medical paradigms. Banner image: Max Simon Nordau, Entartung, Vol. 2, p. 401. 1893 edition. Berlin: C. Duncker. Image taken from Google Books.