Overview

This book offers a novel critical intervention in medical humanities, foregrounding the importance of spaces and senses in medical experiences. It explores the distinctive experience and literary representations of somatic and sensuous geographies in First World War medical caregiving life writing. It demonstrates the complex situation of the medic, who is vulnerable both vicariously and directly to the effects of physical and psychological harm. Chapters look at the medic's relationship with the war environment; the spaces in which medical care takes place; bodies and the wounds of patients in medical narratives; and psychological and imaginative landscapes and textual spaces where complex emotions, trauma, coping and survival are examined.

Full Product Details

9781474489935

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Marie Allitt presents shocking, grotesque evidence from many unexplored medical texts about World War I. Her ""geographies of care"" reveal how spaces localize violations of the body, pain, observers' perspectives, and wrenched language to show the breakdown of places, persons and expression. A powerful introduction to the literature of war. --Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut"

Marie Allitt presents shocking, grotesque evidence from many unexplored medical texts about World War I. Her ""geographies of care"" reveal how spaces localize violations of the body, pain, observers' perspectives, and wrenched language to show the breakdown of places, persons and expression. A powerful introduction to the literature of war. --Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut

Author Information

Marie Allitt is an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in literary medical humanities and modern and contemporary medical life writing. Her research focuses on lived experience of trauma, chronic illness, and caregiving, with particular emphasis on spaces, environments, and architectures of health/care. Her work appears in the BMJ Medical Humanities (2022), and in the edited collections Diagnosing History (2022) and Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to ‘Feeling Bad’ (2021).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available