Communicating Disease

Cultural Representations of American Medicine

edited by Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil

Book cover: Communicating Disease

Extent: 499 pages

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Winter

Subjects: Literary Studies, Medicine

Series: American Studies - A Monograph Series

Series volume number: 236

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(September 2013)

ISBN: 9783825362157

5.28 x 8.27 inches

Price: $72.00

Out of stock

Communicating Disease focuses on the intersections of literature and medicine. It unravels the intricate entanglement of culture and disease and is devoted to the representation of life through medical narratives, exploring its value to both the literary critic and the medical practitioner. Grouped in four sections, the contributions to this volume discuss cultural representations of medical practice, the medical profession, diseases and epidemics, and potential healing functions of narratives.


Communicating Disease focuses on the intersections of literature and medicine. It unravels the intricate entanglement of culture and disease and is devoted to the representation of life through medical narratives, exploring its value to both the literary critic and the medical practitioner. Grouped in four sections, the contributions to this volume discuss cultural representations of medical practice, the medical profession, diseases and epidemics, and potential healing functions of narratives. Topics range from eighteenth-century Old and New World practices of medicine via the careers of nineteenth-century women doctors and nurses subverting dominant gender norms, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cognitive sciences; from smallpox epidemics via yellow fever to AIDS and biotechnology; from Alice James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Siri Hustvedt and Richard Powers as well as women pathologists on the screen; to be concluded by a transnational reading of the world of medicine in the medium of literature.

  • Edited by Carmen Birkle
  • Edited by Johanna Heil