Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies

To introduce the special issue on illness writing in Lebanon, I theorise Lebano-pathography as a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, (i) narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is (ii) a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon. While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories’ causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health.