Sick Ill Diseased

I'm preparing my lecture for tomorrow's class and considering how we use--nay, conflate--the terms illness, disease, and sickness. There seems to be a marked difference between these terms and a book I read recently, The Illness Narratives, gives a useful delineation between the three:

Disease: biological category; medical practice oriented on discovering the strictly biological foundation of a person's dis-ease.

Illness: network of responses to a body's discomfort (individual, family, practitioner, society, etc) and how a body expresses and is read, monitored, and treated within this network.

Sickness: understanding a disorder within a macrosocial network, i.e., whether an illness or disease is endemic to a specific community (often used to fund or NOT fund a push toward a cure--AIDS, breast cancer, et al.)

I'm going to ask my students to write their own illness narrative, where they consider the difference between these three terms and decide how they and their families respond to signs of illness/sickness/disease. I want them to think through bodily discomfort, despite its often-grounded biological genesis, as a series of performances. I'll walk them through Foucault's discussion of how the body "speaks" its discomfort, the relegation of certain discomfort to oblivion if a reliable diagnosis can not be found (for instance, I have friends who have been ill their whole lives but whose bodies' discomfort has eluded diagnosis and so have also eluded treatment and potential relief).

I also want them to really focus on the idea of illness and invalidism, how much of illness is psychosomatic and--most importantly--that even if an illness is psychosomatic it does not take away from the verifiable illness of that body, its need for relief, or the severity of its illness. It seems that labeling an illness as psychosomatic somehow diminishes the degree of suffering, but I ask them to consider how fine the line is between biology and psychosis.

I will start them with Slate articles from the "Medical Examiner" section, then move on to Delia's Doctors (as an introduction to the performative aspects of diagnosis and treatment), then on to Eva's Man (how illness and sickness intertwine, how the body speaks and refuses to speak, how race and gender are inexorably linked in gynecological theory and praxis, etc), and finally close with The Handmaid's Tale (eugenics, OBGYN practice, etc). I'd like to throw in a little Kara Walker, too, when we talk about Eva's Man.

I anticipate the difficulty of switching back and forth on a daily basis between basic writing and the community college and a literature course at the university. It should be a truly interesting pedagogical challenge!

On another teaching note: I've been advised by my two dissertation goddesses to only teach the two classes at Scripps and to turn down MSMC--I have done so. Scripps pays enough to live on (and then some) and they warned me that I am underestimating how much time writing my dissertation, teaching two classes, and applying for the job market (Oct-Dec) will take up. I trust them implicitly---not to mention, how can I play on Doyle's soccer team in the fall if I'm spread too thin?! Ha ha.