What does medicine have to do with literature and vice versa? What stories are told, negotiated, juxtaposed in doctor-patient interactions? Why do doctors tell and need stories? How does literature, with its imagery and its structural features, illuminate medicine as a system of representation? What rhetorical and stylistic devices are embedded in the way we commonly conceive of illness, healing, the medical institutions and caregiving? This course will address these crucial questions and explore the overlaps between two apparently distant disciplines within literary texts from all over the world.
