Description
Book SynopsisElena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century. She traces how writers including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to medical and public health prescriptions, arguing that they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will.
Trade ReviewA 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 RussiaMoving 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 CareThis elegant book stages nothing less than a Slavic studies intervention in medical humanities—and vice versa. In the process, Fratto draws myriad revelatory connections between the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov, among others, and such present-day concerns as medical ethics, disability, posthumanism, and the Covid-19 pandemic. In short,
Medical Storyworlds is a triumph. -- José Alaniz, author of
Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and BeyondAn original and thought-provoking study . . . Fratto’s lively book provides compelling new interpretations of canonical works of Russian literature, and it manages to put the discipline of Slavic Studies into a productive dialogue with contemporary Medical Humanities. * Journal of Medical Humanities *
[A] fascinating, very well-written, and timely book. * Modern Language Review *
[A] nuanced and richly interdisciplinary study. * The Russian Review *
Fratto’s expansive source base, including Russian, French, and Italian texts, along with her command of the theoretical literature, gives us a new platform from which the medical humanities can continue to develop. * Modern Language Quarterly *
Fratto’s absorbing, timely study will be invaluable for scholars, the general reader, and anyone who is interested not only in Russian and European literatures, but also, in the nuanced ways medical narratives shape human lives, and vice versa. * Slavic Review *
This book will be useful to anyone interested in medical discourse, as well as to students of the medical humanities, a field that reaffirms the need to pay attention to patient narratives, as well as to sickness-related fiction as a whole. * H-Sci-Med-Tech *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Grand Finale: Death as the Revelatory Ending
2. End of Story: Temporality and the Prospect of the Ending in
Ivan Ilych,
Anna Karenina, and (Potential) Cancer Patients
3. Medical Enlightenment in the Early 1920s: Rhetoric and Diffused Authorship in Jules Romains’s
Knock and Soviet Public-Health Campaigns
4. Time, Agency, and Bodily Glands: Metabolic Storytelling in Italo Svevo and Mikhail Bulgakov
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
