Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography

by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins

Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice―one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.

289 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought that Hawkins' systematic categorizing of illness narratives' frames (myth of battle, myth of journey, etc.) was interesting, but ultimately outdated. The most revealing section was at the beginning when Hawkins compared religious conversions to stories of disease.

I could tell that this book was published in the early 90's without even flipping to the front to check--partly it was because all the books she referenced were before my time (and almost all on cancer/AIDS), but mostly because the way she approached pathography was too narrow for the current state of illness narratives. I wasn't quite sure how my favorite memoirs--most of which follow no predictable narrative arc, are fragmented, and concern chronic and often obscure diseases--fit into her schema.