Global Disease: Language(s) and the Literary Imagination

This project aims to generate original appreciations of the ways in which research in modern languages may contribute to work in the medical humanities which seeks to understand the role of language and literature in the construction of popular and professional understandings of disease. In a bid to help forge a new international perspective in medical humanities that embraces the richness and diversity of global cultures and foreign languages, the research programme at the heart of the Fellowship takes as its focus the role played by French literature in shaping understandings of and responses to syphilis, the nineteenth century's most deadly, disfiguring and contagious disease. Although the task of representing syphilis exercised medical and imaginative writers in nineteenth-century France, there remains a lack of research on the role played by literature in shaping understandings of the disease. Existing studies that consider the relationship between syphilis and literature at the time are united by their concentration on the ways in which the disease is read metaphorically, as a proxy to characterise the disorder, dissolution and sick(li)ness that were thought, especially in the decadent imagination, to characterise modern life. Research as part of the Fellowship responds to the fact that each of these studies downplays the role of literature in offering a textuality that frames and shapes understandings of disease. Instead, through close and comparative readings of (mostly neglected) prose, poetry, and medical treatises, it will investigate medico-literary synergies in the framing of disease. The following questions will guide its conceptual development: in what ways does disease leave its indelible mark in textual production? How do scientific and literary discourses develop a mutually-reinforcing understanding of disease? How is disease textually transmitted across genres and disciplinary boundaries? Answers to these questions will open up new appreciations of the equivalences between disease and literary inscription, and set the scene for an exploration of the ways in which the nineteenth-century French syphilis literary narrative might be approached as a diseased body -- open to discursive infection, subject to contamination by viral myths that leave their indelible mark, and all the while struggling to find a language to articulate the lived experience of being in pain. From this core research programme two collaborative events will flow and allow for the establishment of an ambitious follow-on research agenda on global medico-literary cultures: a conference which explores the ways in which literature from the French-speaking world represents patient resistance to the 'medical gaze'; and an international, multilingual conference examining the culturally-specific means by which European foreign-language illness narratives add to existing (and primarily Anglophone) understandings of the language patients use to communicate the experience of being in pain. Two impact events will also be used to enhance students' and the wider public's understanding of the value and benefits of approaching some of the key challenges of global healthcare from the perspective of modern languages: a workshop on intercultural health for medical students will reflect on the linguistic and cultural opportunities and challenges of practising global medicine; while a guest lecture on 'The Person in Pain' to members of the public as part of the QUB Open Learning World Literature series will explain how research from a modern languages perspective into the personal diaries of the syphilitic writer in nineteenth-century France offers a rich and fascinating sense of the phenomenological, subjective and experiential side of disease.

Responding to the challenge for modern languages researchers to enhance public understanding of our work, the Fellowship's engagement and outreach events have been planned to illustrate different ways in which modern languages can play a central rather than add-on role in tackling the challenges associated with global disease. The following groups and sectors will benefit:

1. School pupils: the languages students of tomorrow. A new QUB Modern Languages outreach and recruitment presentation will be put together demonstrating the central role played by scholars in modern languages in cutting-edge projects about global health, illness and well-being. Four short 'talking heads' interview-style videos will be produced featuring researchers whose work from a languages perspective is playing a transformative role in tackling global diseases. The central aim of this impact activity is to inspire and recruit a new generation of modern languages undergraduates and potential researchers who will think differently about the importance of studying languages by demonstrating to them that studying modern languages gives them the potential to tackle some of the world's major healthcare challenges and make a real difference to people's lives.

2. QUB medical students, the practitioners of tomorrow, will benefit from a workshop on the challenges and opportunities of intercultural health. This workshop is designed to improve understanding of the issues faced by medical practitioners in a globally-connected, intercultural world. Students will benefit in two ways. The first part of the workshop will focus on 'The Intercultural Medical Practitioner Abroad' and will address the linguistic, cultural and ethical challenges posed to medical translators and interpreters in a world that is forever more globalized. This part of the workshop will conclude with an information session led by the Erasmus Programme Director for Medicine at Queen's, who will outline the international work experience opportunities available to students, and a presentation by the Language Centre at Queen's on the language preparation courses available to medical students thinking of working abroad. The second part of the workshop will focus on 'The Intercultural Medical Encounter at Home'. It will engage with the particular challenges faced by NHS healthcare delivery in multi-cultural and multi-lingual settings, including the role of medical interpreters in facilitating and, on occasions, hampering communication, as will issues surrounding cultural taboos and self-censorship. A concluding roundtable discussion with local medical professionals and healthcare translators on cultural differences in healthcare beliefs and systems will highlight the healthcare benefits of doctors having the linguistic competence to communicate with patients in their mother tongue.

2. The public. An invitation has been extended by Dr Tess Maginess, coordinator of the QUB Open Learning programme, for me to present a guest lecture on 'The Person in Pain' to up to 300 members of the public as part of the World Literature programme and to take part in a follow-up question-and-answer session. This event take as its focus some of the ways in which the syphilitic writer of nineteenth-century France found to communicate what it means to be in pain, and how pain can be expressed beyond banal clichés such as a 'burning' or 'stabbing' sensation. Its aim is to highlight the ways in which key examples of the patient's voice in world literature may open up an instructive perspective on the phenomenological, subjective and experiential side of illness.

Throughout the Fellowship, a QUB-hosted blog will be maintained, allowing for regular postings on events and research findings. Engagement with academic colleagues, medical practitioners and patients will be facilitated through social media by the establishment of a dedicated twitter feed (@GlobalDisease) on the project.