Literature and Medicine

Abstract:

In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf explores the "poverty of the language" in matters of illness and uncovers a lexical rift between patients and caregivers—one that continues to trouble contemporary medical culture. Even as her essay exposes and deplores the sick room's scant lexicon, Woolf herself worked to address these shortcomings throughout her career, steadily crafting a wider and more capacious vocabulary for illness. Such a language, she felt, could heighten the patient's ability to articulate the sensory nuances of illness and, in so doing, foster empathy for the ill. In arguing for the patient's expressive autonomy and advancing new models of humane caregiving, Woolf's writings and nascent lexicography anticipate the rise of narrative medicine in the twenty-first century.