Providential Narratives and Remarkable Bodies: Illness and Disability in Early America, 1650-1776

Stacey Dearing, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation investigates issues of patient agency in early American letters, diaries, missionary tracts, and medical treatises in order to analyze the ways individuals use writing and narrative strategies to shape and establish meaning for their medical experiences. While medicine and disease in early American literature have become increasingly popular fields of study, scholars limit their understanding of narrative medicine by exclusively employing presentist notions of agency; my project offers a literary history of the field of narrative medicine, thereby expanding considerations of patient agency to include texts written before the postmodern era. I argue that patients in the early Atlantic world employ narrative strategies across multiple genres in order to assert agency. If the sickroom was a marginalized space, then patients used writing to establish meaning for their conditions and to maintain connections with larger community networks. My analysis of early American medical narratives reveals alternate ways for understanding, constructing, and articulating power, authority, and knowledge through religious, scientific, and literary discourses. Throughout the project, I complicate and challenge constructions of disease and medicine/medical texts as scientific and therefore not literary. Awareness of historical context allows me to unpack the texts featured in my project in order to undo the notion of a scientific/literary binary and explore the fluid nature of the scientific literary spectrum. Rather than being in competition, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, medicine and literature were seen as mutually informative discourses, each offering unique methods and strategies for understanding, interpreting, and analyzing human experiences of illness. When we divide these fields, we risk missing important insights into the development of early Atlantic literature and sciences, and especially into the texts they produced.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Medicine|Science history|American literature

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