Literature and Medicine

This issue has been seven years in the making. Because Literature and Medicine occupies an interdisciplinary space between literary studies and health care, between textual bodies and bodily texts, I consider the time it took to realize this theme issue an achievement. But there is more at work here. Honoring what befalls authors and editors beset with pain or illness or some combination thereof strikes me as an expression of this journal's mission and, more important in this context, the rewards of patience and the virtues of care.

Pain's ability to disrupt actions and intentions, to alter plans, is nowhere more evident than this issue's history. It began its journey under Catherine Belling's stewardship, when Sara Wasson proposed a theme issue related to her UK grant-funded project on representations of chronic pain that resists conventional narrative forms. The issue was postponed for many reasons, some having to do with bodies in some form of pain. I welcomed it when I took over as executive editor, but then Covid brought further disruptions and delays, more illnesses and more pain. To see it finally in print confirms the claims made by many of the authors in their respective contributions: though pain can be an arresting force, it can occasion written, verbal, and visual expressions that defy its talent for destroying language.

Medicine's uneven and frequently unfair responses to pain can lead to devastating consequences for people experiencing it, as several of this issue's contributors document, but so too can the narrative expectations humanities scholars bring to representations of pain, especially when what is relayed by the afflicted falls short of or outright resists those expectations. As much as this theme issue draws attention to medicine's palliative shortcomings, it also provides the field of health humanities with a wider lens through which to interpret and attend to alternative depictions of bodies in pain. By bringing together a collection of essays that scrutinize literature and medicine equally for their responses to pain, Sara has helped illuminate the unruly but generative [End Page 279] entanglements that emerge when two human enterprises—the practice of medicine and the interpretations of texts—are pushed together.

I want to pause here to consider the influence of disability studies on this issue, in particular its critique of ableism. What does it mean to apply those insights—crip time in particular—to our own practices? Let's take deadlines as an example, a fitting one given how often this issue's publication was delayed. (For the record, I, too, missed my share.) During the composition of this foreword, I returned repeatedly to Brian Dillon's Essayism. As the title suggests, it's a book about essays, which means it's about a lot of things, one of them the connection between depression and writing. Dillon shares his struggles to write when he can no longer get work done on time, and then of the shame that overcomes him when "deadlines [go] floating by like so many lifesavers refused."¹ Like other forms of pain, depression often defies narrative expectations. If we are to take crip time seriously, it will mean shifting away from the productivity model that dominates our professional (and personal) lives, and both expect and accept delays.

I must also address the absence of Front Matter in this issue. Sal Marx's comics were originally intended for that section, along with a roundtable discussion on pain that would have brought together a stellar cast of scholars working within Black bioethics, but its organizer had to withdraw unexpectedly due to health issues. After consulting with Sara and Anna Fenton-Hathaway, we decided to include Marx's work with the cluster of essays and forgo Front Matter altogether. Working with the visionary Sara has been a joy. I thank her, the other authors, and Anna for making this issue a true contribution to our understanding of pain.