Medicine as Storytelling: Emplotment Strategies in the Definition of Illness and Healing (1870-1930)

This dissertation analyzes medical and literary sources from Russia, Italy, and France in the years 1870-1930. By tracking imagery, rhetorical devices and, above all, emplotment strategies that are employed in medical texts and practices as well as in literary works by Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Svevo, Bulgakov, and Romains, my study argues for the narrative structure of medical knowledge, both in its formulation and its transmission. I address plot-construction as the theoretical node that lies at the core of several practices in the medical field, regardless of their variety and their social and cultural situatedness. Perspective and agency are the organizing principles for chapter subdivision—from the surgeon as the sole author of illness narratives in Chapter 1, on death as the ending, which focuses on the late nineteenth century, we move to the negotiation of that same authorship and authority between doctors and patients in Chapter 2, devoted to the theoretical concept of narrative reliability and tracks the fin-de-siècle emergence of psychoanalysis; from the rhetoric of pharmaceutical advertisement in the 1920s and the diffused authorship it entails, addressed in Chapter 3, we take a post-human turn in Chapter 4, by exploring bodily glands as endowed with narrative agency with the rise of endocrinology and experimental surgery in the years 1900-1930. This formal structure, which shows a gradual shift in perspective and agency as the inquiry moves from one chapter to the next, foregrounds a double historical trajectory that underlies the project– the non-linear transition from the positivist model to the Freudian and post-Freudian stage in the history and epistemology of medicine runs parallel to a gradual and not less problematic evolution of the literary medium.Comparative Literatur