The physical world could drain and erode morale. The weather proved to be a central feature in the infantrymen’s experience of war. This chapter considers key themes that emerge from soldiers’ descriptions of winter: the cold, the rain, the mud, the snow, all of which were exacerbated by soldiers’ exhaustion. It discusses in turn the experience of winter 1914, winter 1916, and winter through spring 1917/18. These experiences fed negative perceptions of the military and encouraged men to view the war more pessimistically. They complained about trench conditions, clothing, and food. Furthermore, the anticipation of winter (as much as the experience of it) harmed motivation and morale. It undermined soldiers’ ability to visualise the future as they became frozen in time. Yet, soldiers’ negativity and pessimism after Passchendaele indicate that a deeper, more problematic, and increasingly pervasive gloom descended over the BEF in winter 1917/18. Yet, even then, men fell back on coping mechanisms. Their resilience shone through as they were able to project their discomfort onto the enemy and rationalise their winter experiences as a necessary (and temporary) trial. In fact, the experience of winter transformed soldiers’ perceptions of the campaigning season, which they viewed in a much more positive light. Spring and summer were preferable to the impotence of winter. Even if the warmer months promised more fighting, there was some agency to be found in battle. Furthermore, military action might end the war before the onset of the next winter.

Focusing on illness narratives, this chapter analyses how patient-writers use language to translate the corporeal experience of illness and, in the process, how they express what it means to be ill. In line with the conceptual aims of the critical medical humanities, it does not simply examine the ways in which writing about illness serves as a response to the silencing effect a moment of diagnosis can produce; rather, it analyses the ways in which language is mobilized to communicate the embodied experience of being a patient. The chapter asks how writing about illness in pathographies allows patients to resist ceding control of their experience to the dominance of medical jargon, before analysing the extent to which reading narratives of illness can help patients to understand, and in turn find a linguistic framework to articulate, what it means to be ill.

This chapter examines the representation of illness and impairment in various works of fiction, poetry, and memoir to demonstrate the creative possibilities of disability. Where literary uses of disability have historically been thought to denote suffering, corruption, social failure, or inspirational and redemptive lessons aimed at non-disabled readers, recent scholarship has explored disability’s generative relation to structures of plot and to poetics as well as its epistemological effects, constituting new forms of knowledge. The chapter spotlights three texts that explicitly challenge tropes of deviance and lack and foreground bodymind anomalousness as the source of creative expression and knowing.

Starting in the early twentieth century, this chapter surveys the most significant essays about disability and essays written by writers with disabilities, including Helen Keller, Randolph Bourne, Paul K. Longmore, Leonard Kriegel, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Exploring the common themes and the rich variety of styles represented in these essays, the chapter synthesizes a wide array of firsthand experiences by people with blindness, polio, schizophrenia, deformities, multiple sclerosis, and other conditions. Some of these essays highlight the discrimination and exclusion faced by the authors – Longmore’s stories of the financial hardships he faced due to his disability are a particularly compelling example – while others craft a new poetics to describe the singularity and promise of a life lived with a disability. The chapter closes with contemporary essays that illustrate the extent to which the field of disability writing has greatly diversified in the twenty-first century, offering a more extensive record of human experience.

Narrative health psychology is a subdiscipline of health psychology that brings narratives into illness to help patients make sense of their illness in the context of their lives. Narrative health psychology can be effective in helping people with chronic conditions and with serious health problems such as cancer and heart disease because these diseases have such a large impact on people's lives (not just patients but carers and families) that it is important to consider how the disease fits in with the whole life experience of the patient.

Thomas Hoccleve has long been identified both as an autobiographical poet and as a poet who hoped that his writings would speak on his behalf to prospective readers and patrons. This chapter builds upon these insights by suggesting that Hoccleve felt certain literary materials could exercise a quasi-religious or even quasi-legal force, or “vertu,” in the social world. I argue that Hoccleve’s faith in this idea was motivated by his familiarity with two other late-medieval discourses in which certain words were believed to possess a direct and unmediated kind of power: the language of Lancastrian bureaucracy, which Hoccleve knew firsthand from his work at the Privy Seal, and the language of the church, and in particular sacramental language. I suggest that, in the Series, Hoccleve attempts to write a kind of poetry that will exercise an analogous kind of “vertu” upon his audience. By composing a book that will speak directly to the “prees” on his behalf, he hopes to circumvent the skepticism with which his own words have been received by his readers and patrons in the wake of his “wilde infirmitee”—even if he doubts that, in the end, the Series will do exactly what he wishes.

Michael Finke provides an account of the fatal illness that overshadowed almost the whole of Chekhov’s career and resulted in his early death at the age of forty-four. Finke traces the course of the illness, Chekhov’s correspondence, and the testimony of those around him, reflecting on Chekhov’s reticence and stoicism with regard to his illness in the context of his views of mortality, degeneration, and the body.

In Chapter 6, we first review ideas about how illness disrupts ongoing narratives and how narrative reorganization is required to make sense of illness. We touch on the role of communicating suffering through narrative and how listening to narratives allows healthcare professionals to take the perspective of service users. We then discuss proposals that constructing adaptive narrative identity may be essential in psychotherapy. Following this, we review studies demonstrating that individuals with psychopathology construct their narrative identity with less agency, communion, and positive meaning and that these same features are related to lower well-being. We outline possible relations between trauma, narrative identity, and psychopathology. Finally, we describe relevant studies of first-person perspectives on mental illness and explain how previous research relates to our life story analyses.

This essay explores the relationship of literature and perversity in Roberto’s Bolaño’s short fictions “The Secret of Evil,” “The Insufferable Gaucho,” and Distant Star. While literature within the history of Latin American letters often provides a critique of or antidote to political and economic atrocities, in Bolaño’s texts literature is complicit in the very horrors it depicts. In Bolaño’s view, any effort to pit fiction and social actuality against each other in the interest of rescuing either represents a means to avoid the disturbance that, for Bolaño, defines contemporary existence.

This chapter builds upon feminist reinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory to reconsider how the processes of variation, heritability, and natural selection do not preclude the possibility of thriving disabled life. Despite the cooptation of Darwinian thinking by later social Darwinists and eugenicists that led to the mass institutionalization and genocide of disabled people, I argue that Darwin’s scientific writings provide the unexpected foundations for a counter-eugenic reading of evolution in their conception of life as perpetually changing and thus open-ended. From the perspective of disability, the value of an organism’s adaptation and form cannot be predetermined by any static notion of fitness that presumes ablebodiedness as a prerequisite for viable life. By reading evolutionary temporality and Darwin’s own disabled lived experience through disability theory’s conception of crip time, I ultimately suggest that Darwinian evolution imagines disability not reductively as an evolutionary dead end but instead as the variable adaptation of human survival.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

Providing an overview of health, medicine and medical practitioners in France at the time of Molière, this chapter shows that, unsurprisingly, medical treatment and access to trained practitioners depended on social status and geographical location, although life expectancy for adults was not as uneven as we might expect. While humoral medicine continued to dominate, key advances were accepted over time, and the publication of medical works in the vernacular disseminated knowledge among literate lay persons. The challenge is to recognise what Molière’s audiences would have found credible or risible. His depiction of illness and medicine belongs to the traditions of farce, comedy-ballet and extravagant entertainments, and should not be read as a reflection on his own health or treatment by doctors. Two farces (Le Médecin volant, Le Médecin malgré lui) and a farcical scene in Dom Juan derive broad humour from a character grotesquely impersonating a physician. In contrast, three comedy-ballets (L’Amour médecin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le Malade imaginaire) feature genuine physicians treating patients whom they seek to exploit for financial gain if they are delusional and gullible. Yet music, dance and entertainment are also artfully contrived to restore health, at least in the world of the theatre.

Chapter 13 examines Hegel's understanding of animal and mental illness and extrapolates from them an account of social pathology. Social pathologies should be understood not only in terms of impaired functioning or as imbalances among functional spheres but also as ways in which society fails to enable its members to relate to life in the mode of freedom, including: social practices becoming indistinguishable from processes of mere life; social impediments to realizing practical selfhood, such as inadequate sources of recognition or the generation of infinite, unsatisfiable desires; and ideology that involves a mismatch between what social members do and what they take themselves to be doing in their practices. The form of immanent critique found in Hegel's account of bondsman and lord is presented as a promising solution to the problem of providing an ethical justification of social norms that avoids reducing the morality to mere functionality for social reproduction.

Panic attacks are frightening experiences. During a panic, you experience strong physical sensations that feel very serious and threatening at the time. This can leave you fearful of having further panic attacks. This chapter outlines how to understand and beat panic attacks at this time. Pregnancy is a time of lots of physical change and lots of focus on those changes, which can be difficult if you have become worried about physical sensations. It can be difficult managing panic attacks if you are caring for young children. We guide you through the cognitive understanding of panic attacks, that they are driven by understandable but incorrect interpretations of physical sensations. We will help you to apply this theory to your individual situation, to recognise which sensations are particularly frightening, and outline experiments to target behaviours such as avoidance, focus on sensations and other factors that keep the fear going.

Drawing on the ideas of ancient Greek scientists, people in early modern Europe thought of their bodies as containing fluids that influenced health. To them, illness was caused by an imbalance in these fluids, for which bloodletting was the most common treatment. Food was more important than medicine in keeping the body healthy, and what people ate was determined by social class and religious teachings. Many children died young, and those who survived began their training for adulthood at an early age. As young people reached adolescence, the experiences of boys and girls grew more distinct from one another. Authorities tried to restrict sexual behavior, but courts were successful in imposing rules only when these fitted with community norms. Most people married, earlier in eastern and southern Europe than in northern and western Europe, and remarried after the death of a spouse. Widows were more common than widowers, and older women were poorer than older men. Death came at all stages of life, and the living cared for the dying and memorialized the dead with a variety of rituals. Families, guilds, and religious organizations provided people with a sense of community.

Tefo’s voice came in a sudden and surprised cry from behind the closed door, followed by steady sobbing. From the broad slapping sound that punctuated his wailing, I gathered that his mother Kelebogile had taken a pata-pata, or flip-flop, to him. As she beat him she challenged him with scarcely controlled fury: ‘Why do you like to go up and down so much, eh? Why don’t you listen?’

Just as illness and difficulties punctuate our lives, so do times of healing and achievement. As an experience of recovery and renewal, healing through self-expression is a creative process and a triumph of the creative trance. It can bring the possibility of a new self, new work, and new aspects of existence. Illness influenced Itchiku Kubota to expand his designs of Japanese textiles and kimonos. Addressing both emotional and physical pain, healing with creativity can occur through the creative arts therapies and in individuals. By using her creativity in hopes of healing the world, Greta Thunberg healed her difficulties with speaking. Paradoxically, impairments may augment the creative trance by becoming a transforming illness, as in Ludwig van Beethoven’s increasing deafness that imparted greater power to his music. Even when a condition is terminal, and there is no cure, there can still be healing with an altered, yet profound form of creative trance.