This thesis seeks to address two distinct sets of criticisms that have been offered at medical practice. The first criticism suggests that medicine today is too exclusive in its application of the term 'disease.' As a consequence, important biological phenomena are marginalized by physicians and scientists. The second criticism suggests that medicine has been too inclusive in its understanding of disease. As a result, many biological phenomena that were once considered 'natural' or 'normal' aspects of human life are now given a medical dimension that they previously did not have. The goal of this thesis is to understand why two seemingly contradictory criticisms have been applied to the same practice. To answer this question, I invoke Edmund Husserl's important analysis of modern science to argue that medicine suffers from a problem of 'naive objectivism.' This problem is present under the dominant paradigm of medical diagnosis, the biomedical model. Having identified the source of these two criticisms, my goal is to then develop new models of medical practice that can address these criticisms. First, I turn to John Dewey's philosophical naturalism to develop a medical model that can address the problem of exclusion in biomedicine. Then, I turn to Martin Heidegger?s existential analytic to develop a medical model that can address the problem of inclusion in biomedicine. I supplement both of these analyses with research generated in the medical humanities fields, attempting to show how the biomedical model of medicine fails to meet the goals of medical care. The end result of such analysis is the development of two new medical models that can serve to replace the biomedical model. I offer no attempt to adjudicate between these two models, instead leaving such issues to be handled by the patient and the physician throughout the course of his or her treatment.

This thesis investigates the impact of the intersection of physical disabilities and mental health conditions on the masculine identities presented in modernist texts. Here, I analyze a collection of works by Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Claude McKay, and Wilfred Owen. Utilizing a combination of theoretical approaches: trauma theory, gender and sexuality studies, narratology, disability studies, and insights from the medical humanities, I revisit well-known novels like The Sun Also Rises and Lady Chatterley's Lover and illuminate lesser-studied works like "A Natural History of the Dead" and the recently published Romance in Marseille. I recognize here the psychosocial struggles faced by wounded and shell-shocked veterans after WWI, the alterity experienced by transnationally migratory men of color in the interwar period, and reflect on the authors' mediation of their own experiences through writing. By integrating historical and biographical accounts, medical texts, and literary criticism in this thesis, I hope to present fresh perspectives on masculinist Modern fiction.

In the early 17th century, Aristotelian ideas about the passions came under scrutiny. The dominant, if not only, understanding of the passions before that time came from Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas split most of his main passions into opposing pairs - love/hate, joy/sorrow, fear/bravery etc. Aquinas described the opposite of desire as 'fuga seu abominatio (flight or abomination).' Although grappled with by earlier philosophers such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Cajetan, it was not until the 17th century that thinkers attempted to challenge Aquinas's opposite of desire. This thesis looks at five writers who used a variety of terms, often taken to be near-synonyms of disgust in the historiography - Thomas Wright, Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More and Isaac Watts - and challenges that view. Each of these men wrote works that, at least in part, attempted to understand the passions and each had a different understanding of Aquinas's opposite of desire. The thesis uses a corpus analysis to investigate uses of the words each thinker chose as an opposite of desire and then examines each writers' influences, experiences, and intentions, to analyse their understanding of the opposite of desire. Secondly, these various opposites of desire appear to bare a family resemblance to modern disgust. All are based upon the action of moving away from something thought of as harmful or evil, and all have an element of revulsion alongside the repulsion. This has led to much of the historiography of these sorts of passions making the assumption that these words simply referred to disgust. This thesis argues that these opposites of desire are not the same as disgust; the differences outweigh the similarities.

This thesis examines the construction of cancerous disease in medical and literary texts from 1580 to 1720. I contend that previous readings, which have viewed ‘cancer’ and ‘canker’ as words designating a wide variety of ulcerative diseases, are incomplete. Though terminology for the disease is sometimes challenging, I argue that early modern people clearly understood cancer as a pathologically unique disease, which was both fascinating and fearsome. Cancer was believed to be caused by surfeit of the melancholy and choleric humours. In part because of this aetiology, it was strongly associated with women. At the same time, however, medical and literary writers spoke of cancer in zoomorphic terms, and constructed the disease as deliberately cruel and intractable. Viewed alongside cancer’s famously morbid effects upon the body, this duality made cancer a powerful (and as yet unstudied) analogy for traitorous and malignant influences in the social and politic body. In turn, rhetorical uses of ‘cancer’ influenced how the disease was presented in medical and scientific writing. Cancer’s seeming hostility to the body also encouraged medical practitioners to develop, and patients to demand, treatments for the malady which trod a thin line between healing and hurting. Physicians, apothecaries and irregular practitioners administered increasingly potent pharmaceuticals, which moved away from traditional methods of redressing an individual’s unbalanced humours, and instead emphasised the importance of ‘defeating’ this enemy, even at great physical and emotional cost to the patient. Even more hazardously, surgeons carried out invasive and dangerous cancer operations, which could save lives, but which equally provoked angry debate over moral responsibility in the crowded medical marketplace.

Thesis advisor: Laura Tanner / Illness touches all of us, both directly and indirectly, and to respond to a reality with physical and psychological ramifications, we turn to diagnosis for answers. The role of diagnosis is to place a name upon a bodily disorder, giving a patient some idea of what has gone wrong in his or her body, and how life may change. At its essence, diagnosis renders a mysterious set of symptoms into a tangible, understandable disease that can, ideally, be recognized and treated. Yet this perspective can seem strangely simplistic. How can a single word or phrase encapsulate the variable and far-reaching effects of illness on the complicated lives we live? And what are the effects of the application of the phrase to a patient’s life: a comforting awareness, an estrangement from healthy society, or something in between? / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Allison Adair / This collection of poems and nonfiction essays is intended to explore the experiences of both patients and providers in the field of emergency medical services. Written by a first responder, the pieces study the grief, intimacy, discomfort, and humanity witnessed in a few years' work. Topics to be examined include the writer’s own experience as a patient, vulnerability in medicine, the separation of provider and person, end-of-life experiences, and the human desire to connect deeply with one another. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

This thesis explores shell shock--a common but misunderstood disorder seen in soldiers of World War One--through a Medical Humanities framework. Chapter 1 conducts a traditional medical review of scientific articles published on the pathology, symptoms, and treatment of shell shock between 1914-50. Chapter 2 builds upon this by offering a literary reading of Rebecca West's novel, The Return of the Soldier, which was published as the war drew to a close in 1918. The reading of West draws upon the medical research detailed in Chapter 1 to offer new conclusions about Chris's shell shock. The thesis shows how taking an interdisciplinary approach to shell shock enables the development of new perspectives of and approaches to shell shock, its history and significance, and its links to present-day mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Diagnosing Narratives: Illness, the Case History, and Victorian Fiction” explores how the medical case study competes with patients’ experiential accounts of disease in the development of popular nineteenth-century fictions. During most of the Victorian period, clinical medicine served as the primary producer of medical knowledge. At the same time, its objectification of the sufferer—epitomized by the case narrative, the most prevalent form of nineteenth-century medical writing—led to an increasingly distanced relationship between doctor and patient. I argue that the mid-century novel responds by featuring narrator-sufferers who co-opt aspects of the medical case in order to represent their own subjective experiences and rethink what constitutes medical knowledge. As the century came to a close, however, sciences of the laboratory, rather than the clinic, began to gain epistemological sway. In light of widespread skepticism regarding the possibility of translating discoveries made in the lab into effective bedside practices, I contend that popular novels and short stories now returned full circle to the clinical case approach as a valuable alternative to the laboratory. The result is late-century fiction structurally and thematically driven by the useful yet sometimes callous techniques of the diagnostician and his case method. I chart these shifts through an examination of works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. My project illustrates the responses of these authors to prevailing power dynamics in the world of medicine and offers a new reading of the ways in which the Victorian preoccupation with disease shaped literary narrative.

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Objectivity is a valued principle in western allopathic medicine, and for good reason: it has been very effective in saving lives and improving quality of life since the nineteenth century. In recent years, however, there have been many visible accounts in social and mass media describing the consequences of disbelief by physicians, particularly from women and people from marginalized communities. This paper uses an urban bioethics perspective to examine how overreliance on the principle of objectivity can lead to violations of bioethical principles that it should be in balance with.First, media and personal accounts of physician disbelief and misdiagnosis of patients are discussed. This is followed by a brief discussion of the historical roots of objectivity in medicine, an examination of the particular difficulty western medicine seems to have with medically-unexplained symptoms, and a closer look at specific diseases that encounter stigma in the clinical setting. From there, specific bioethical principles are analyzed. Nomaleficence is violated when clinicians traumatize their patients through disbelief of symptoms that cannot be confirmed through confirmatory testing and when they prematurely assume a psychogenic cause of symptoms simply because the cause cannot be found with a physical examination, laboratory test, or imaging study. Solidarity, autonomy, and agency are violated through the denial of the patient’s expertise in their own experience and the disempowerment of the patient in the doctor-patient relationship. Distributive and social justice are violated when the efficiency demanded of a medical system built upon reliance on objective findings disadvantages patients with difficult-to-diagnose conditions along with women and marginalized groups. Potential solutions to the unethical overreliance on objectivity include changes to medical education and culture to be more allowing of fallibility and humility, as well as better integration of mental and behavioral health into the primary care setting, so patients’ medical and psychosocial needs may be treated more holistically. Structural changes to the healthcare system allowing better physician reimbursement for clinical counseling will also mitigate dependency on objective findings for diagnosis and treatment. / Urban Bioethics