Joseph K. visits the sick house: how the medical humanities require the medical posthumanities.

Abstract

This paper challenges the typical function of narrative in the medical humanities to advocate for a medical posthumanities: an approach that destabilizes the centrality of "the human" and instead embraces patient narratives that are embodied, fragmented, and provisional. To make this claim, we first challenge the stability of the "humanity" described in the "medical humanities" and reiterated in the genre that we call "the medical romance." In this genre, illness and suffering destabilize a sense of identity and coherence, which is then restored through introspection and interpretation of the patient narrative. To challenge this genre, we turn to surface reading, a literary studies technique that sees traditional interpretation as too hurriedly foreclosing on meaning. Through a close reading of Franz Kafka's The Trial and Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, we demonstrate both what surface reading looks like and also how it embraces generic and interpretive instability. Finally, we focus this approach to narrative on physician-assisted suicide (PAS), particularly attending to PAS and disability, to argue that both medical romance and its entailed traditional narrative interpretation overvalue "the human" as an agential individual seeking a "good death." This at once affirms the tendency to encourage the allegedly meaningful death of disabled people by PAS, and also excludes from narrative focus the structural and environmental sources of suffering. The medical posthumanities, in its attention to embodiment, networks, environment, and the decentralizing of individual agents, would better make room for patient narratives that value the messiness and interconnectedness of lived experience.