The ring of suffering: how Irish narratives of illness help with coping with Covid. From the article:

In our attempts to convey suffering to medical professionals we borrow words of violence: shooting, stabbing, burning, sharp, piercing, words that, as Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) highlights, are associated with destruction. This conflation of pain and violence renders the patient broken and powerless. The failure of language to convey painful experience is in some ways indicative of a larger problem with modern medicine: it relies on a diagnostic system of scans and test results that distances care givers from patients and deprives patients of control of their own bodies.

In an effort to remedy this problem, medicine has, in the past two decades, turned to a patient-centred care model. Concomitantly, we have witnessed a rise in the publication of illness narratives.…  Books about illness and the end of life are still a mainstay of the north American non-fiction bestseller lists as western society struggles to come to terms with mortality….

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, first-hand accounts by patients who survived the virus have dominated the news. These narratives are fascinating because they address our fears and questions surrounding the virus: What are the symptoms? How will I know if I have it? Running the gamut of inspiring tales of recovery to haunting stories of relapse and dying alone, these narratives force us to confront the horrors of the virus, but they also connect us to each other by creating a shared sense of grief over what has been lost….

As useful as illness narratives can be, like … video technologies, they have their limits. While they may provide insight into the experience of sickness and a sense of empathy with others, illness narratives cannot instruct us on how to manage a pandemic or provide a vision of what the future might hold. In a practical sense, historical accounts of the pandemic of 1918 … might provide more useful information as to how we can improve governmental responses to the virus and control its spread. In this regard books like Ida Milne’s Stacking the Coffins (2018), which provides a fascinating account of how the flu affected Ireland during the revolutionary period, could be quite valuable….

Nevertheless, illness narratives that are not directly about the pandemic … do offer something historical accounts cannot: they force us to consider what it means to occupy a body that is susceptible to breakdown and failure, and in this way confront us with the question of what it means to be human. While many of the narratives emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic directly address the virus and its repercussions, it will be interesting to see its indirect influence on literature and nonfiction written in its wake.

For other posts on narrative medicine, see here.