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Author Biography

Heather Meek is Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal. Her work explores the intersections of literary and medical cultures in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on texts authored by women and physicians. Her most recent publications include a monograph, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and a collection of essays, Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge), co-edited with Heike Härting.

Abstract

Frances Burney’s mastectomy letter, in its graphic and detailed depiction of the operation she underwent without anesthetic in 1811, does not always lend itself immediately to standard, scholarly classroom discussion. It tends, rather, to incite unusually intimate responses, as well as conversations about medicine and health today. In my teaching of the letter in literature courses at Université de Montréal over the course of the past 13 years, I have found that students are inclined to seize upon the subject of breast cancer as especially contemporary in its relevance and to share their own anecdotal knowledge of the disease. I incorporate these tendencies into my teaching, adopting a method grounded in the once-undervalued—though now increasingly recognized—critical frameworks of presentism and personal experience. This essay describes this method by presenting a range of student responses to Burney’s letter and demonstrating how affective engagement and presentist thinking emerge as legitimate and constructive strategies that stimulate students’ analyses of the letter and other related works that they read in my courses, including eighteenth-century medical texts, contemporary breast cancer memoirs, and a range of required and optional critical works in the medical and health humanities and in eighteenth-century and feminist disability studies. I encourage students to ponder the imaginative possibilities of illness and its representation, to reflect on the ability of narrative to confront pain and trauma, and to isolate in Burney’s letter representations of a feminine bodily ideal that look forward to perceptions of women’s bodies today. As they blend the scholarly and the personal and consider connections between past and present, students reflect in unanticipated ways on complex medical landscapes and doctor-patient relationships, both then and now.

Keywords

Frances Burney, long eighteenth century, mastectomy, life-writing, breast cancer, illness narrative, pedagogical approaches, presentism, personal experience, medical humanities, health humanities, narrative medicine, disability studies

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