Reviews and Notes: Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography

Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins. 217 pages. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press; 1993. $14.95.

Contemporary pathographies—stories of illnesses written by patients—are the successors, suggests Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, to accounts of religious conversion and cautionary parables. Rather than throwaway rantings of doctor bashers, these narratives of disease and treatment illuminate, like their earlier counterparts, fears of death and hopes for redemption.

A rigorously trained medieval scholar now teaching literature in a university medical center, Hawkins does a tremendous service for the contemporary physician. By treating these texts with the seriousness she would bring to the study of Dante or Donne and locating them within the genre of spiritual autobiography, she makes taxonomic sense of these accounts of cancer, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, heart disease, and other illnesses, transforming them into constellations of findings that describe serious problems in the medical enterprise.

Grouping contemporary accounts of illness into tales of rebirth, epic journeys toward cure, battles against disease (and sometimes against physicians), and quests toward healthfulness, Hawkins recognizes that the authors she studied are seeking control and personal strength by appropriating plots and concerns from classical and religious myths. Through her learned and thoughtful discussion of myth making and pathographic truth, Hawkins uncovers perhaps the most desolate reality of contemporary medicine: The ability to transcend individual fate is rare, and the capacity to endow personal trouble with spiritual meaning seems lost. In our secular times, warns Hawkins, many patients (and many of their physicians) seem devoid of reflection, engaged only in the quest for physical health. Hawkins's diagnosis, although grim, can at least initiate proper treatment: to help our patients discover the meaning not only of their symptoms but also of their lives. Help is found, suggests Hawkins with great generosity, by heeding the voices of patients and physicians as they try to find some meaning in suffering.