This essay explores the connection between physical and geopolitical boundaries in Porochista Khakpour's 2018 memoir Sick in the forms of immigration, national identity, and cross-country migration, ...and the bodily boundaries that protect against infection. Rather than equating the body politic with the immune system, the author argues that Sick's nonlinear structure creates an ideal form for representing an illness that is primarily characterized by uncertainty and multiplicity. The author then discusses how Khakpour's connection of different states of privilege-namely, relating to class, race, and diagnosis-to this uncertain state of existence creates a form of life writing that resists the Western-centrism of narratives of illness and migration alike.
Abstract
Pathography is a medical anthropological approach that examines the relationship between creation and psychiatric disorders through psychopathological and psychoanalytical lenses using case ...studies. Since it was first defined in the mid‐1960s, pathography in Japan has kept pace with current advances in psychopathological research. However, to date, the findings of pathographic research in Japan have not been published in English. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to introduce the history, methodology, and development of pathography in Japan to the English‐speaking world, accompanied by some classical examples. The paper first describes the history of pathography, from its origins in ancient Greece to important research in the field, including examples of publications and translations. Next, the paper presents the methodology of classical pathography as an approach that shares clinical psychopathology and psychiatric evaluation methods. This topic also introduces five main theses on the relationship between creativity and psychiatric disorders: opposition (“in spite of”), parallelism (“because of”), substitution (“instead of”), intrinsic (“belonging to”), and sublimation (“subsequent to”). Finally, the paper describes the development of pathographic research in Japan by summarizing the pathographies of several figures, including both creators and characters in literary works, and introducing the latest research on salutography, a newly developed field of study that explores the relationship between creativity and mental health. The paper concludes with a few words about the current limitations of pathography and suggestions for ethical considerations with respect to privacy legislation.
By the beginning of his fourth decade, if not before, Robert Schumann suffered from hearing disorders and vertigo. In Schumann’s pathography, the associated symptoms have usually been regarded ...independently and are thought to have been caused by a psychological/ functional disorder; in view of a suspected syphilis in Schumann, vertigo attacks and hearing disorders can also be explained by a syphilitic affection of the inner ear (otosyphilis). Within the framework of this hypothesis, the symptoms of an inner ear disorder can not only be attributed to a hitherto rarely considered joint cause, but, beyond that, to a primarily somatic disease. This essay examines the medical plausibility and musicological significance of a presumed otosyphilis in Schumann, drawing on diary entries, letters, and contemporary accounts.
An ongoing economic and financial meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port-since 2019, Lebanon has been assailed by a spiralling confluence of mutually ...exacerbating crises. The present-day poverty, hunger, and unemployment levels are coeval with an extraordinary rise of similarly hyper-endemic sextortion cases. While drawing on its author's experience of sexual blackmail in Lebanon, this article narrates the various parameters of this pathology and its trauma-its perpetrators, progression, and victims-in relation to several documented instances of this illness, including three excerpts from my students' memoirs (2020-2023). The resulting 'pathography' reveals sexual blackmail in Lebanon as a nuanced corollary of not only socioeconomic tensions, but also sex stigma. In a context where societal attitudes to sexuality remain, to a significant extent, regressive, being sexually active, regardless of sexual orientation, incurs a status quo of shaming and silencing that most affects the sexual and mental health of the country's vulnerable groups: youth, particularly women, and queer individuals more generally.
To introduce the special issue on illness writing in Lebanon, I theorise Lebano-pathography as a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, (i) narrative intervention (form/method) that does not ...depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is (ii) a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon. While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories' causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health.
Diagnosis is a profoundly social phenomenon which, while putatively identifying disease entities, also provides insights into how societies understand and explain health, illness and deviance. In ...this paper, we explore how diagnosis becomes part of popular culture through its use in many non-clinical settings. From historical diagnosis of long-deceased public personalities to media diagnoses of prominent politicians and even diagnostic analysis of fictitious characters, the diagnosis does meaningful social work, explaining diversity and legitimising deviance in the popular imagination. We discuss a range of diagnostic approaches from paleopathography to fictopathography, which all take place outside of the clinic. Through pathography, diagnosis creeps into widespread and everyday domains it has not occupied previously, performing medicalisation through popularisation. We describe how these pathographies capture, not the disorders of historical or fictitious figures, rather, the anxieties of a contemporary society, eager to explain deviance in ways that helps to make sense of the world, past, present and imaginary.
It is now more than a decade since the death of celebrity television personality Jade Goody – a high water mark in public dying comparable to the watershed moment in public mourning marked by the ...death of Diana, Princess of Wales, a decade or so earlier. As Walter has noted in this journal, Goody’s very public and highly mediated dying will not be the last. With that in mind, this article analyses the sociological significance of public dying in the decade following Goody’s death – the ‘tens’ of the 21st century. It does so chiefly by focusing on a number of high-profile instances which gained significant media traction, using these to examine the ways in which dying is both performed and made meaningful in contemporary 21st century culture. The argument presented operates on the assumption, following Goffman, of life – and by extension, dying – as performance.
Lekarz teatralny to jedna z kluczowych figur procesu przemian teatru jako instytucji między końcem XVIII a początkiem XX wieku: otaczał opieką artystów, gwarantował wewnętrzny ład instytucji i ...współkształtował społeczną percepcję i ocenę zawodu aktorskiego. Przyczyniał się do organizacji teatru jako przestrzeni kontrolowanej i unormowanej, w której ani reakcje widzów, ani obyczaje artystów nie burzyły ogólnego porządku. Artykuł stanowi historyczne studium kształtowania się posady i obowiązków lekarza teatralnego w XIX wieku na podstawie pamiętników, prasy, materiałów ikonograficznych (w tym karykatur). Wychodząc od analizy źródłowych tekstów, takich jak pisma samych lekarzy teatralnych (Kazimierz Łukaszewicz, Gustave-Joseph Witkowski), autorka przyjmuje dwie równoległe strategie: 1) rekonstruuje biograficzno-faktograficzne tło obecności urzędowego doktora w polskim teatrze, 2) problematyzuje relacje między instytucją teatru a formami zorganizowanej opieki medycznej, chorobami aktorów a wyobrażeniami teatru jako miejsca niebezpiecznego i patologicznego, patografią aktorskich chorób a ideą publicznego ładu i systemu wartości, wewnętrzną a zewnętrzną percepcją profesji scenicznej.
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