Columbia University Press Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Though often seen as scientific or objective, medicine has a fundamentally narrative aspect. Much like how an author constructs meaning around fictional events, a doctor or patient narrates the course of an illness and treatment. In what ways have literary and medical storytelling intersected with and shaped each other?In Medical Storyworlds, Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century―a period when novelists were experimenting with narrative form and the modern medical establishment was taking shape. She traces how Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to contemporary medical and public health prescriptions, placing them in dialogue with French and Italian authors including Romains and Svevo and such texts as treatises by Paul Broca and Cesare Lombroso. In nuanced readings of these works, Fratto reveals how authors and characters question the rhetoric and authority of medicine and public health in telling stories of mortality, illness, and well-being. In so doing, she argues, they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will. Bridging the medical humanities, European literary studies, and Slavic studies, Medical Storyworlds shows how narrative theory and canonical literary texts offer a new lens on today’s debates in medical ethics and bioethics. Review Moving fluidly between modern medicine and Russian literature, Fratto explores a vital question: who authors medical narratives. Focused on questions of plot and agency, her subtle analyses reveal how physicians develop their ideas about disease, entrepreneurs market meanings of health, and patients assert their voices to narrate their own medical storylines.--David S. Jones, author of Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac CareA significant contribution to the growing field of medical humanities and its applications to Russian literary and cultural studies, Fratto's book makes striking connections between narratives written a century ago and the most pressing concerns in today's medical ethics. Engaging, informative, and inspired.--Julia Vaingurt, coeditor of The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia About the Author Elena Fratto is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.