Global Disease: Language(s) and the Literary Imagination

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This project aims to generate original appreciations of the ways in which research in modern languages may contribute to work in the medical humanities which seeks to understand the role of language and literature in the construction of popular and professional understandings of disease. In a bid to help forge a new international perspective in medical humanities that embraces the richness and diversity of global cultures and foreign languages, the research programme at the heart of the Fellowship takes as its focus the role played by French literature in shaping understandings of and responses to syphilis, the nineteenth century's most deadly, disfiguring and contagious disease. Although the task of representing syphilis exercised medical and imaginative writers in nineteenth-century France, there remains a lack of research on the role played by literature in shaping understandings of the disease. Existing studies that consider the relationship between syphilis and literature at the time are united by their concentration on the ways in which the disease is read metaphorically, as a proxy to characterise the disorder, dissolution and sick(li)ness that were thought, especially in the decadent imagination, to characterise modern life. Research as part of the Fellowship responds to the fact that each of these studies downplays the role of literature in offering a textuality that frames and shapes understandings of disease. Instead, through close and comparative readings of (mostly neglected) prose, poetry, and medical treatises, it will investigate medico-literary synergies in the framing of disease. The following questions will guide its conceptual development: in what ways does disease leave its indelible mark in textual production? How do scientific and literary discourses develop a mutually-reinforcing understanding of disease? How is disease textually transmitted across genres and disciplinary boundaries? Answers to these questions will open up new appreciations of the equivalences between disease and literary inscription, and set the scene for an exploration of the ways in which the nineteenth-century French syphilis literary narrative might be approached as a diseased body -- open to discursive infection, subject to contamination by viral myths that leave their indelible mark, and all the while struggling to find a language to articulate the lived experience of being in pain. From this core research programme two collaborative events will flow and allow for the establishment of an ambitious follow-on research agenda on global medico-literary cultures: a conference which explores the ways in which literature from the French-speaking world represents patient resistance to the 'medical gaze'; and an international, multilingual conference examining the culturally-specific means by which European foreign-language illness narratives add to existing (and primarily Anglophone) understandings of the language patients use to communicate the experience of being in pain. Two impact events will also be used to enhance students' and the wider public's understanding of the value and benefits of approaching some of the key challenges of global healthcare from the perspective of modern languages: a workshop on intercultural health for medical students will reflect on the linguistic and cultural opportunities and challenges of practising global medicine; while a guest lecture on 'The Person in Pain' to members of the public as part of the QUB Open Learning World Literature series will explain how research from a modern languages perspective into the personal diaries of the syphilitic writer in nineteenth-century France offers a rich and fascinating sense of the phenomenological, subjective and experiential side of disease.