Literature and Disease

The relationship between literature and medicine and, indeed, between authors and sickness has often been a personal one. Much has been made within the field of medical humanities of Virginia Woolf’s assertion that: ‘[c]onsidering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. ¹ Suffering from illnesses both physical and mental throughout her life, Woolf recognised the struggle, drama, and inherent banality involved in being unwell, as well as the changing shape of medicine and health-care within early-twentieth-century society. As a range of critics including Thomas Szasz and Thomas C. Caramagno have recognised, Woolf sought to capture these elements in her fiction, alongside her own personal experience; for instance, in Mrs Dalloway (1925) Woolf famously addresses shell-shock and the inadequacies (as she saw them) of psychological treatment available under doctors of the Holmes and Bradshaw type. Woolf’s novel damningly juxtaposes the alienating and patronising experiences of Septimus Smith, based on her own treatment for recurrent nervous breakdowns and depression at various points between 1897 and 1913, against the uninformed perceptions of Peter Walsh who muses on how the efficient yet impersonal ‘light high bell of the ambulance’ was ‘one of the triumphs of civilisation’. ² The representation of sickness and health informs and influences the thematic character of Mrs Dalloway; illness fluctuates between the foreground and background of the narrative, much as it did in Woolf’s own life.