Bodies Evoked in Words: Two Views of Activism, Illness, and Art

Whether overtly or subtly, you can learn a lot about the world that produced a book, film, or painting if you look closely enough to the circumstances of its making. Some creative works are themselves a start to a debate, a refutation of a political point, or a heated argument in textual form. For decades now, healthcare in the United States has been a hotly-debated issue. It’s no shock to see that the ongoing debates around the Affordable Care Act–from its inception to its rollout to its fate–have coincided with the popularity of a number of acclaimed and well-read memoirs about illness, medicine, and what they can tell us about ourselves and our society’s relationship to health and mortality.

Not every memoir recounting a harrowing experience with an illness or other medical condition is explicitly political–but the fact that they at a point in American history when discussions over the state’s relationship to the health of its constituents have grown particularly heated makes them far from apolitical. And it’s difficult to imagine someone reading one of these books without an increased amount of compassion or empathy for their authors–and, by extension, people grappling with life-threatening conditions.