Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Memories of the Body Broken Review of Ambition Is Not a Dirty Word Review of The Blood of Flowers Review of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Review of The Poet Laureate of People Who Hate Poetry Creative Nonfiction My Boo Radley By Rebecca Ward A Walk in the Park By Madonna Dries Christensen Poetry Hearts and Diamonds By Andrena Zawinski It Was Then I Kissed Her By Andrena Zawinski In By Andrena Zawinski Death of Word By Tony Brown Fiction Being Caught Up With My Ego By David Landrum A Voice In My Head Screamed By J. A. Tyler About the Contributors © 2008, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Editor - Elizabeth Murray Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
Memories of the Body-Broken: Why I Right By Catalina Florescu To Mircea and John, my extensions into being-(M)other Some diagnostics are as elementary as palpation— touching a lymph node lightly and sensing its swollen form. Other tests require that my body be illuminated by radioactive materials so that my inner parts glow on a screen, making computerized images. Imagism. Imagistics. (Rosenblum 11) We probably first met our double reflected in a mirror, where we initiated a game of gluing together and ungluing the pieces of our elusive mirror identity. However, whenever we play this game, we rapidly perceive and/or fabricate the changes in our body’s choreography, a little bit afraid that if we stayed longer in front of a mirror, we might get hypnotized by our projected double. Another method to analyze our bodies is by looking at photos of ourselves. Nonetheless, this process is less an act of perception than it is an emotional phenomenon through which we try to recapture the circumstances at the time of the shooting. It goes without saying that both ways of looking at our bodies are, in fact, examples of seeing their representations. Undoubtedly, a small breakage occurs when we face these representations, although this type of breakage resonates in us more on an emotional than on a physical level. Describing Jacques Lacan’s “imaginary anatomy,” Elizabeth Grosz explains it as “an effect of the internalization of the specular image” [that] “reflects social and familial beliefs about the body more than it does the body’s organic nature” (86). The clash between the physical map of our bodies and its psychical map may sometimes become irreconcilable. Furthermore, the verbal map of our identity has often been slippery, if not misleading. Put differently, the process of verbalizing our physical and psychical maps has given us the impression we are fabricated, translated, adjusted, and incomplete (if not constantly other) through words. However, if an illness does not shake our foundations, a preliminary question that needs to be raised is, how frequently do we get acquainted with our bodies? By examining two memoirs (Marjorie Williams’ 2005 “Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir” in A Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate and Barbara Rosenblum’s 1996 Cancer in Two Voices), I argue that, unlike the breakage perceived when we contemplate ourselves in mirrors and/or in photos, the breakage brought about by the onset of their cancer—and its fluctuating side-effects over their bodies—serves as examples of a body-broken. Through experiencing acute pain, their body-broken becomes a body-unknown, a body examined and re-examined, and finally a body that becomes unusable. Both Rosenblum and Williams write about the breakage in their habitual bodies when cancer was discovered too late by their doctors; consequently, their fight is not only toward winning a battle over cancer, but also a battle with those who were supposed to be able to detect their cancer earlier, when the breakage presumably would have had a smaller impact on their lives. Thus, in their memoirs not only do they write (about) their pain, but they also show how their suffering has the right to be known, for it uncovers uncomfortable truths about the medical practice. A good venue to start analyzing the problems faced by these women can be through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s usage of the concept of en parergo [something which occurs alongside other things] (134). He expands it by suggesting that “We are only able to become aware of ourselves when we are fully occupied with something else that is there for us; only when we are completely involved in something beyond us can we return to ourselves and become aware of ourselves” (134). Is becoming ill, and the implicit rupture that it generates to our lives, a dangerous way to become aware of ourselves? But where would we situate the “return” in this context? There is the person (who, up to the diagnosis, has had a habitual existence; who still has friends, job responsibilities, family, and a name); and then, there is the patient (who enters hospitals, gets acquainted with doctors and their medical staff, as well as with medical procedures, and becomes respondent, or non-respondent, to several treatments). It is the second term (i.e., patient) that seems to gain in importance and capture the first’s term space (i.e., person), and thereby generating a discrepancy between a person’s/patient’s past and current life. Through the experiences within a body-broken, a person/patient drastically redefines his/her identity. As Williams recounts, “I live at least two different lives. In the background, usually, is the knowledge that for all my good fortune so far, I will still die of this disease [cancer, in advanced stage]. This is where I wage the physical fight, which is, to say the least, a deeply unpleasant process” (321). The intimate space of one’s person is thus visited, if not invaded, by too impersonal reactions. Describing how relationships are formed in space, Grosz notes that “Nothing about the ‘spatiality’ of space can be theorized without using objects as its indices” (92). What types of indices does our internal structure possess? The question could be better formulated as, what do these indices exactly tell us as long as they are made manifest on our skin as signs of some advanced internal affliction? It is important to address these questions because they attest the transformations accomplished in time by the art of medicine itself. About these changes, Susan Sontag remarks that In premodern medicine, illness is described as it is experienced intuitively, as a relation of outside and inside: an interior sensation or something to be discerned on the body’s surface, by sight (or just below, by listening, palpating) […] In the older era of artisanal diagnosis, being examined produced an immediate verdict, immediate as the physician’s willingness to speak. Now an examination means tests. And being tested introduces a time lapse […] that can stretch out for weeks. (AIDS, 35) In addition to being tested (oftentimes over-tested), another difficult task when an individual recovers from a traumatic experience is the act of remembering it; thus, a different type of time lapse emerges. According to Cathy Caruth, those who undergo trauma experience “The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death” which “is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (63). The “I” contained within the word “Identity” (or, even better, corporeal identity) finds itself negotiating its new functions and roles. Furthermore, in an era of instantaneity (where we benefit from and are overwhelmed by the usage of digital cameras, cell phones and the internet), it is practically impossible to predict how patiently a person will wait to find out the results of his/her test(s). To rephrase, does waiting intensify one’s pain? does the intellect brutalize the pain? When in pain, the body—or the affected bodily area for that matter—is thoroughly sensed by us, giving us the impression we are locked inside our body. In this context, Rosenblum provides a pertinent example. Knowing that soon she will reenter the traumatic zone of chemotherapy, she composes a short, matter-of-fact note: Dear friends, enclosed is the schedule for my coverage during the second chemotherapy week while Sandy is away. For most of the time during the first few days I will be sleeping, so please bring things that will keep you busy. It might be helpful to check in with the persons who will be with me before your shift in case there are things you need to pick up. (18) This passage is indicative of how Rosenblum meticulously prepares herself before she will be(come) completely unaware of her body during the chemotherapy session’s peak. She makes in advance a list of “to do’s” because she will be temporarily out of her body. Or, maybe we could argue that she will be completely immersed in her chemotherapy, and therefore not able to function uninterruptedly as before. I also believe she makes this list because her life partner, Sandy, will be gone. During Rosenblum’s first chemotherapy session, Sandy noticed certain reactions in her lover’s body. In other words, Barbara (the person/patient) and Sandy (the partner) try to create an effective method for dealing with the chemotherapy while being outside the hospital’s jurisdiction. (At that time, Rosenblum was not hospitalized.). During the first chemotherapy sessions, the two women (along with considerable support from their female friends) tried to find out as much as possible about Rosenblum’s body reacting to her cancer treatment. They had hoped her first reactions during chemotherapy would evolve into a pattern, so that they could more effectively minimize its traumatic side effects. Sadly, no pattern emerged. Moreover, once her body started to reject all prescribed treatments, Rosenblum was face to face with her collapse. As she writes, When you have cancer, you have a new body each day, a body that may or may not have a relationship to the body you had the day before. […] You don’t know from moment to moment whether to call a particular sensation a ‘symptom’ or a ‘side effect’ or a ‘sign.’ It produces extreme anxiety to be unable to distinguish those sensations that are caused by the disease and those that are caused by the treatment. […] Interpretation of a sensation always depends on having at least two bodily events close enough in time to make meaning of seemingly random events. And most of the time, I live in a world of random bodily events. (166) This quotation allows a reflection upon the differences between a body-broken versus a body-collapsed; a body that could still be trusted versus a body that becomes too damaged to attempt any recovery; a body that does not, like all bodies, follow the entropic law, but a body that suddenly succumbs and is consumed by pain. Pasi Falk thinks the human body “[i]s the most obvious and familiar visible ‘thing’ perceived and yet a blind-spot which tends to disappear in the very act of perception” (1). Both Williams’ and Rosenblum’s experiences focus on the familiar body turned unrecognizable and, unfortunately for them, unusable. Both are intrigued by their diagnosis, particularly since they both had pursued a healthy lifestyle, had accomplished much in their careers (the former as a journalist, the latter as a sociologist), and had steady relationships. Not only is cancer an illness with an uncertain etiology, but it also throws its sufferers into a crisis of meaning, where the most challenging and frustrating debates happen in the form of fractured corporeal monologues. On numerous occasions, Williams and Rosenblum remind us that if their doctors did not misread the two women’s tests, or, surprisingly, had urged them immediately to have CAT scans, their lives would not have been unjustly cut short. As Rosenblum lets us know, “One fight I’m waging is a malpractice suit against Kaiser Hospital, which failed to diagnose my tumor as cancer over a year ago. They dismissed it, time after time, as benign fibrocystic disease” (20). The process involved in Williams receiving her current diagnosis is even more dramatic. As she recalls, she first sensed a lump during a casual conversation on the phone. When she met with her doctor, he told her, “I would think […] that what you’re feeling is stool, that’s moving through your bowel” (310). A second doctor tells her she has fibroids. After an MRI followed by a biopsy, she finds out that “There are at least five large metastases of the cancer in my pelvis and abdomen, and the mother ship […] surrounding and infiltrating my inferior vena cava […] Tumors so widespread automatically ‘stage’ my cancer at IV (b). There is no V, and there is no (c)” (319). When Williams’ diagnosis was finally given, she was in total shock. She summarizes her appointment with the doctor as follows: What it boiled down to was: we have nothing to do for you. You cannot have surgery, because there’s so much disease outside the liver. You certainly can’t have a transplant—they’ll never give a liver to someone who’s had extra-hepatic disease; it’s against all the rules. You’re not a good candidate for any of the newer interventional strategies, and we can’t do radiation because we’d destroy too much viable liver tissue. All we can do is chemotherapy, and to be honest, we really don’t expect much in the way of results. (326) Williams’ diagnosis, as well as Rosenblum’s, put them in the category of “too late,” where no recovery was possible. With the cancer spreading more and more inside their bodies, their sense and usage of time shrank considerably. As Williams recounts, I have weathered days of wretchedness and pain without a whimper, only to come unglued when some little glitch suddenly turns up to meddle with the way I had planned to use some unit of time: that this half-hour, and the contents I had planned to pour into it, are now lost to me forever seems an insupportable unfairness (329). It is one thing to reflect upon death, yet another to be in the epicenter of the dying process. Living in “Cancerland” (Williams 328), or on an island engulfed more and more by the waters of “it is too late” and “there is not much we could do for you,” they try (but do not always succeed) to use their “units of time” as purposefully as possible. Corporeally more dramatically than ever in their lives, they know that soon they will not be able to sense themselves, that they will be deprived of their capacity to use speech coherently, and that ultimately they will not be able to be the subjects of their own bodies. However, when their attempts at recovery fail to materialize, there still remains the alternative of forgetting. During her first days as a person/patient of cancer, Rosenblum writes in her diary: “My cancer counselor told me that forgetting was the most prevalent symptom among people with cancer. It is, she said, the mind’s way to protect you from experiencing the terror of knowing” (31). On her deathbed, she makes another entry in her diary: “I am dying. […] I have about a month left. […] Narcotics help. They dull everything a little bit, but the tragedy center of my brain is barely touched by any pill. For that, two stiff martinis and a good cry” (195). Juxtaposed, these verbal images of Rosenblum record the impact of cancer on her life focus on the possibility of denial (the first quotation) versus her acceptance of cancer (the second quotation). Furthermore, the second entry made me think of the famous Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. In antiquity, plays were performed there, wine was enjoyed, laugher and cry mingled, satyrs were luscious, Maenads were rapturous, and the god of tragedy was thus rightly celebrated. His amphitheatre is now in ruins. Visitors still peregrinate its site, and those with imagination can hear the echoes of much simpler days’ celebration of life. Without doubt (and if permitted), Rosenblum’s story is different. With her body completely destroyed by cancer, literally in ruins, there is yet one single place where illness could not manage to break through. In the center of her brain, the tragedy of her experience plays uninterruptedly. There, less and less frequently, there are also performed recollections of her life as “whole-Barbara,” as if her head had become a snapshot of memories. Does a patient’s extreme experience of pain advance more and more or plough deeper and deeper into a person’s intimate space? What could be the identity of a patient whose personhood is captured almost exclusively through memories? Finally, does a patient’s experiences engulf a person’s former identity, who, faced with the breakage in his/her life, cannot resist this change, just like water cannot stay still in a sieve? (It keeps the sieve wet, though, until the water evaporates and disappears into thin air.) Before considering these controversial questions, it is useful to note Nöel Arnaud’s puzzling idea: “Je suis l’espace où je suis” (i.e., “I am the space where I am”) (Bachelard 137). Arnaud made this remark in reference to what it feels to be standing in a corner. From there, one person would have an angular perspective on all nearby objects; simultaneously, one would feel entrapped, immobile. If we put together these two perceptions, the result may be following into the pattern of transitive thinking. Broadly defined, in the field of logic and mathematics, the transitive phenomenon refers to cases where a new relationship develops between elements that share something in common; for example, if one element is related to a second, and the second is related to a third, then—according to the transitive principle—a relationship is formed between the first and the third elements. In this particular case, when an illness breaks one’s physicality, when that breakage is beyond possible repair, and when objects seem to be somehow more alive than those individuals who can barely move because of their pain, then one could feel oneself immobile as an object. At the end of her life, Rosenblum had the same feeling. As she notes, “Although Heidegger is not my favorite philosopher, there are now lessons to be learned from him. A dog dogs. The world worlds. Barbara Barbaras. A world where nouns and adverbs dissolve into essences. Barbara is still Barbaring and that makes me feel alive in yet another way” (128). In this short passage, Barbara has a split vision of her present self: Barbaras (present active) and Barbaring (present participle), both tenses subtly paralleling the presence of pain, which has made her “alive in yet another way,” and which, I assume, has helped her reach her “essence.” Once she has reached her essence, pain—like the nouns and adverbs mentioned above—began to dissolve. Thus, pain lodged in Barbara’s essence, stopped having a meaning; and it did not matter anymore. As she writes announcing that she lost the battle, “I don’t have emotions like you [Sandy] do anymore” (194). When a body, like Rosenblum’s, is so consumed by pain as to be able to feel itself, does this mean pain resides/remains only in the head? Once the human body is close to ceasing its sensations, does this mean it exists only peripherally, that is to say, in the mind? According to Drew Leder, “The brain […] shares with the viscera a depth disappearance. […] Yet this disappearance is nothing but […] the focal disappearance of the surface body. […] As I gaze upon the world, I cannot see my own eyes” (113). We cannot see the brain, but we feel it branching throughout our corporeality. But in those cases where pain is too much for one person/patient to bear, does the mind transform pain into an obsession? Does cognition impair suffering? The brain, the most “absent organ” (Leder 113) from our bodies, seems to be challenged with a very demanding task: it has to make itself present to understand pain and its changing intensity and density. The enduring patient’s body learns to mediate between ego sentiens (i.e., “the sensing I”) and ego scribens (i.e., “the writing I”) which both, through recording fluctuating sensations and inscribing verbal reactions to pain, attempt to discover some soothing explanations to patior (i.e., “I suffer”). We frequently ask what pain is, how we construct its meaning, how deeply it damages our tissues, organs and dreams. As suggested by the experiences of Rosenblum and Williams, in the end, following sequence after sequence of bodily deteriorations, pain ceased being felt, or—even better—pain was all that they felt. Hence, to dull their pain, the two women were given strong tranquillizers. Unfortunately, in severe cases, the persons’/patients’ bodies may move beyond the initial breakage caused by the illness, becoming unrecognizable and unusable. Furthermore, the experiences undergone by Rosenblum and Williams reveal that sometimes bodies could break beyond our control, and in that case our commitment to recover them is rarely sufficient. Unfortunately, their bodies did not react consistently to any of the several prescribed treatments. In such cases, it may be useful to “[r]ecover a sense of the importance of minds and cultures in the construction of pain, and we must begin to proliferate the meanings of pain in order that we do not reduce human suffering to the dimension of a mere physical problem for which, if we could only find the right pill, there is always a medical solution” (Morris 290). In other words, to find “the right pill” is symptomatic of a more general and intricate condition, when people, after they have been diagnosed, become “medical cases.” The search of finding the most suitable medical treatment to people’s specific diagnosis has little to do with offering comforting solutions to their suffering (which, in many cases, involves humiliation and isolation). In fact, there is something else about Rosenblum and Williams that captivated and saddened me at the same time while reading their memoirs. If the two women seem sketchy to readers it may be because they barely wrote anything about their lives before their diagnosis of (advanced) cancer. Using the literary genre of memoir, their writing surprisingly seemed unwilling to unmask a life they had before, although in most cases of physical and emotional breakages, a reconnection with the patient’s/person’s past is highly recommended. Thus, with no outside narrator to interject him-/herself between what the two women were willing to share with us, their memoirs became a brutal confession of pain, where as a reader one may realize the other, hidden side of the medical practice and discourses, as well as the empty rhetoric of some health-related campaigns (Almost every product that we buy today has an inscription that imposes its validity through catchy words such as “healthy,” “better life,” “natural,” etc.). Their memoirs constantly suggest the importance of seeing doctors more frequently in an attempt to open a more vibrant dialogue between ourselves and our body. When a person’s/patient’s body breaks beyond possible recovery, then inevitably medicine’s infrastructure is shaken as well. At one point in her memoir, Williams speaks openly about an unpleasant, yet typically encountered truth: I try to remember that I am one of the luckiest cancer patients in America, by dint of good medical insurance, great contacts who gain me access to the best of the best among doctors. I’m quite sure that if I were among the forty-three million of my fellow Americans who had no health insurance—let alone a really good insurance—I’d be dead already. (329) Yet our concern is not only about having or not having (good) medical insurance. We also want immediate answers, just as badly as we want quick solutions to our problems. Part of the explanation of this phenomenon is related to the physicist Isaac Newton who predicted that the Scientific Revolution’s “[g]oal is how, not why. That I cannot explain gravity is irrelevant. I can measure it, observe it, make predictions based on it, and this is all the scientist has to do” (Berman 43). In this light, we erroneously see certain institutions as being unbreakable, or immune to break, when in reality they cover nonchalantly their weak points. Simon J. Williams starts his book, Medicine and the Body (2003), by reminding us that “Prior to the ‘age of reason,’ for example, supernatural beliefs about malevolent spirits, ideas about evil and divine intervention, and practices of sorcery and witchcraft were highly influential in Christian Europe” (10). Sadly, there are people who still think that “malevolent spirits” exist among us. The situation gets complicated when we cannot explain the causes of certain illnesses: “The doctrine of specific etiology is likewise problematic—no one-to-one correspondence can be assumed between pathological agent X and disease Y” (Williams 13). When our body is spatialized by an illness, we want doctors to cure it immediately. By so doing, we falsely invest doctors with supernatural powers, demanding them to make the illness disappear, as if doctors knew a mantric spell, or as if they possessed a magical wand and we were living in a wonderland temporarily interrupted by pain. Memoirs such as Rosenblum’s and Williams’ remind us forcefully that this is not so, that, in some cases, medicine cannot prove its endeavors successful. As shown in this essay, human bodies react differently to illnesses, thus maintaining themselves—even through the encounter with their pain—as unmistakably personal as possible. Rosenblum’s chemotherapy could not stop her tumor ramifying throughout her whole body’s topology. Williams’ treatments managed to keep her alive long after her doctors’ pessimistic pronouncement. (Initially, they told her that she would live 4 to 5 months maximum.). Even more surprisingly, in many cases, her body could engage in its routine as magnificently as it had done before its diagnosis, defying, if only temporarily, the typical damages resulting from cancer. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Sontag in her book, Illness as Metaphor (1978), in the 19th century, tuberculosis was considered a scourge for humanity. Still, back in those days tuberculosis was surrounded by a mysterious aura. Some people thought highly of it, considering it to be a symbol of a refined, wondering, Romantic poetic spirit. No such positive connotations are attributed to cancer. Ultimately, this illness has profoundly questioned our confidence that a body, once broken, could be restored through treatments, surgery and rest. In other words, cancer has managed to create a breakage in what seems to be situated outside our internal topology, in our socio-cultural and political strata, but which profusely infiltrates into our minds and bodies. There is yet one more piece that needs to be added to decipher these two women’s stories. In Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine (1996), Katherine Young affirms that “writings, as Stewart notes, are ‘tracks of the body,’ like other bodily aftermaths: footprints, fingerprints, scent trails, aftertastes […]. Scars are the body tracks of the surgeon on the patient. […] Surgery as a discourse overwrites the body’s inscription as a cultural text. […] So bodily inscriptions affect our deciphering of signs of presence in the flesh (86). When people are diagnosed, they gradually relinquish their former selves as they get acquainted with medical procedures and more or less invasive tests. The “I” as fleshed out in autobiographical writings becomes more vulnerable and assertive at the same time. The written (and thus exposed) “I” mediates between the public sphere (as represented by medical institutions and practices) and the private one (as amassed through the experiences recorded beyond one person’s epidermal boundaries). The body that was once apparent, there, becomes transparent because of acute pain and suffering. I started this essay by showing two ways of seeing the contours of our corporeal identity (through photos and in front of a mirror). In reaching its conclusion, we realize that we cannot see the other’s pain, but we can interpret a collapsed, body-broken being similar to a convex mirror where nothing stands still and where there is no stable center of gravity anymore. A body in acute pain has various nociceptive foci. On such a mirror, a patient perceives her/his new corporeal identity as being created at the intersection of two axes: the horizontal body (which is confined in bed day, after day, after day) and the “vertical,” vigilant mind (which retains a hope of the body being restored to its previous condition). Finally, we may interpret these two axes as a cut, a line, or a breakage inserted in one’s identity because of intensifying pain. I envision that in years to come, these labels will function as cultural “hieroglyphs” of our limited information and/or knowledge in regard to human anatomy. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Berman, Morris. Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. Trans. Jason Geiger and Nick Walker. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion : Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 1994. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Rosenblum, Barbara and Sandra Butler. Cancer in Two Voices. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink Books, 1996. Sontag, Susan. AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989. ---. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Williams, Marjorie. “Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir.” Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate. New York: Perseus Publishing, 2005: 307-339. Williams, Simon J. Medicine and the Body. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2003. Young, Katherine. Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. |