Chapter 6 - Illness and the ‘Fall’ of Language

Summary

Focusing on illness narratives, this chapter analyses how patient-writers use language to translate the corporeal experience of illness and, in the process, how they express what it means to be ill. In line with the conceptual aims of the critical medical humanities, it does not simply examine the ways in which writing about illness serves as a response to the silencing effect a moment of diagnosis can produce; rather, it analyses the ways in which language is mobilized to communicate the embodied experience of being a patient. The chapter asks how writing about illness in pathographies allows patients to resist ceding control of their experience to the dominance of medical jargon, before analysing the extent to which reading narratives of illness can help patients to understand, and in turn find a linguistic framework to articulate, what it means to be ill.