ABSTRACT

This chapter examines trauma, illness and its literary representation in written narrative, Sontag usefully links disease and illness, the experience of trauma and the languages we use to describe and communicate such abject embodiments. It considers the ways that written narratives come to function as containers for the trauma of illness. The primary trauma of pain and illness would seem to be the profound difficulty of putting these intense physical and mental experiences into words and narrative form. The musician Ben Watt’s 1996 memoir Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness is in many ways an archetypal pathography that demonstrates the complexities of putting the pain and trauma of serious illness into narrative form. The chapter also considers the role that narrative has come to play within medical education, as an object that constructs a bridge between a patient’s traumatic experience of pain and illness and the emerging skill-set of a young clinician.