This chapter examines how Bengali authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use the mosquito to experiment with scale in fiction and poetry. Authors such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Trailokyanāth Mukhopadhyay, Annadāshankar Ray, and Tārāshankar Bandyopadhyāy question both Western medical perception and Western concepts of literary realism by stressing how malaria and mosquitoes escape neat categorizations of meaning. Furthermore, the mosquito in works of poetry and fantasy also shows the interconnection of medical, political, and environmental issues. This chapter uses postcolonial criticism, medical history, and methods drawn from the Health Humanities in order to engage the poetics and politics of Bengali literary interpretations of malaria. By so doing, it stresses the importance of non-Western perspectives to the study of literature and medicine, suggesting that scholarship engage the multiple medical value systems as well as literary traditions that reinterpret and subvert Western tenets of scientific thought.

For nineteenth-century British novels, illness did not exist just within the individual body; illness occurred at the level of communities. Responding to and building upon contemporary medicine’s focus on the social contexts of disease, novels of this era enlarge their plot structures to include more characters, more relationships, and more scopes of action than existed in novels before this century. In nineteenth-century novels, the collective experience of illness can be as intimate as the bonds between a sufferer and a caregiver or as diffuse as a global pandemic. In any case, illness revealed one’s embeddedness in larger structures of meaning. The formal characteristics of Victorian novels offer ways for critical medical humanities today to envision the social ties involved in the illness experience.

Graphic Medicine enriches and expands the field of Medicine and Literature by providing an additional, visual, modality for understanding stories of illness and well-being. Combining words and pictures, the hybrid medium of comics engages both left and right hemispheres of the brain, which can lead to more immediate, intuitive, and complete comprehension for the reader/viewer than text alone. This essay briefly addresses the origins and commitments of Graphic Medicine and illuminates, through Visual Thinking Strategies, why and how comics are particularly effective in the domains of clinical medicine and medical ethics – that is, for healthcare providers and medical learners, and for patients as well.