Anita Wohlmann

’Living Autobiographically’: Concepts of Aging and Artistic Expression in Painting and Modern Dance.”

This article discusses the ways in which artists have incorporated or failed to incorporate the aging process of their bodies into their art. Using Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the French painter Claude Monet as cases in point, we explore situations in which physical changes brought about by aging compromises artists ability to engage with their artistic medium. Connecting Monets oeuvre and Baryshnikovs dance performances to life writing accounts, we draw on John Paul Eakins concept of living autobiographically: In this vein, life writing research does not only have to take into account concepts of identity as they emerge from life writing narratives, but it also needs to explore the somatic, corporeal and material dimensions of these narratives.

Rewinding Frankenstein and the body-machine: organ transplantation in the dystopian young adult fiction series Unwind

While the separation of body and mind (and the entailing metaphor of the body as a machine) has been a cornerstone of Western medicine for a long time, reactions to organ transplantation among others challenge this clear-cut dichotomy. The limits of the machine-body have been negotiated in science fiction, most canonically in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818). Since then, Frankensteins monster itself has become a motif that permeates both medical and fictional discourses. Neal Shustermans contemporary dystology for young adults, Unwind, draws on traditional concepts of the machine-body and the Frankenstein myth. This article follows one of the young protagonists in the series, who is entirely constructed from donated tissue, and analyses how Shusterman explores the complicated relationship between body and mind and between self and other as the teenager matures into an adult. It will be shown that, by framing the story of a transplanted individual along the lines of a coming-of-age narrative, Shusterman inter-relates the acceptance of a donor organ with the transitional space of adolescence and positions the quest for embodied selfhood at the centre of both developments. By highlighting the interconnections between medical discourse and a literary tradition, the potential contribution of the series to the treatment and understanding of post-transplant patients will be addressed.

Pharmaceutical care as narrative practice? Rethinking patient-centered care through a pharmacist’s perspective

Illness is a disruptive experience that requires high-quality care. The best evidence-based medical treatment risks losing some of its efficacy, however, when patients feel misunderstood when faced with the complexity of their experiences. They might stop treatment, refuse to disclose relevant information or seek unsound alternatives. A narrative-based approach to health care understands the patient’s case history as a narrative that can be read or analyzed like a story. In other words, this approach honors individual illness experiences through the stories that patients tell. While programs that train ‘narrative competence’ have been successfully implemented in medical education, an application to pharmaceutical training is missing so far. We argue for the necessity to complement evidence-based pharmaceutical practice with narrative-based approaches to ensure high-quality care. Using the perspective of a pharmacist in a case scenario, we exemplify the centrality of “narrative pharmacy” for improving the quality and safety of pharmaceutical health care.

Naturalist sentimentalism: ageing between hopefulness and decline in Rebecca Harding Davis’s short fiction

Abstract This article examines four short stories by the American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910), who became a nationally acclaimed writer with the stylistically innovative novella Life in the Iron Mills (1861). Using the double perspective of age studies and ‘naturalist sentimentalism’, the essay analyses Davis’s representation of the paradoxes of old age. Davis blends sentimental ideals of sympathy, sacrifice and hope with naturalist themes of entrapment, the inevitability of decline and biological determinism. Four short stories by Davis will serve as cases in point: ‘At Noon’ (1887), ‘At the Station’ (1888) and ‘Anne’ (1889) present middle-aged and older women who struggle with ageist notions of decline; ‘The Coming of the Night’ (1909) examines from a male perspective issues of retirement, care, and the denigration and marginalisation of the elderly in a ‘Home for Aged Men’. In these stories, Davis discusses the meanings of age and ageing, intergenerational conflicts, gender, and the impact of the body and social context on the experience of ageing. In drawing on both sentimental and naturalist themes and combining them, Davis’s stories reflect conflicting notions about ageing and old age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Of Termites and Ovaries on Strike: Rethinking Medical Metaphors of the Female Body

This article explores how problematic or detrimental metaphors of the female body can be reimagined. Metaphors that compare the body to a machine or factory influence the ways in which women understand their bodies (e.g., its potentials and limits) and the decisions they make (e.g., in view of reproductive technologies, education, and careers). Feminist research has investigated and denounced the problematic sociocultural connotations of metaphors such as the biological clock. This article explores the semantic ambiguity and creative potential that these metaphors harbor and how that potential can be used productively as a space of agency. In drawing on research from psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, medical anthropology, and palliative care, where metaphors have been conceptualized as powerful tools of the imagination and as sites of political and rhetorical resistance, the article analyzes two texts—one by Eliza Bisbee Duffey, a women’s rights activist in the late nineteenth century, and one by Cindy Chupack, a screenwriter for the TV series Sex and the City—in which seemingly detrimental metaphors of the female body are used to rebut reductionist and misogynist notions of what it means to be female, notions that are framed by medical authorities as scientific “facts.” The authors rethink metaphors used by medical professionals and suggest alternative visions of what it means to have and live with a female body.