At first glance, the study of literature and the medical field don’t seem to have much, if anything, in common. But their intersection has a surprisingly rich history. “There used to be poetry in medical texts,” says Sari Altschuler, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. “And if you talk to doctors, many of them want to be writers. That tradition is hundreds and hundreds of years old.” She found herself thinking about that tradition in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly how people were turning to literature to grapple with pain — a collective pain that was both highly visible in the protests after George Floyd’s killing and obscured behind closed doors in hospitals and isolated households. “There was a lot of reading [works like] Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ or ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ … these books that were supposed to provide some way of making sense of what was happening,” she says.
Others in her academic community were thinking about it, too. Thomas Constantinesco, a literature professor now at the Sorbonne, was at work on the book “Writing Pain in the 19th Century,” when the pandemic hit. Just before, with grant money from the Marie Curie foundation, he and Altschuler had put together a symposium calling for papers examining the intersection of pain and writing. “The essays were so great,” Altschuler says. “We thought, we should really try to pitch them somewhere.”
