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READING FOR HEALTH
Joseph McLaughlin, series editor
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Reading for health involves, as medical advisers routinely assert, knowing what health is. Just as in the therapeutic model, wherein one must be sick to get cured, so too in the hygienic model one must recognize good health to maintain it. But as the novelists discussed in the following chapters demonstrate, and as the organization of this book suggests, defining health and maintaining it are interdependent narrative acts. One’s ability to know what health is does not always precede one’s attempts to maintain it. In fact, it is through the maintenance of health, particularly through acts of prevention, that we can know health, that it becomes a legible text that we become proficient in reading. We define our health, in other words, by the ways we interpret and modify our body’s responses to, for example, the environment in which we live, the food we eat, the physical activity we exert, and the mental and physical hardships we endure.41
While the following chapters reflect an evolution of fictional form and medical practice during the nineteenth century, they do not aim to tell a linear or progressive history of either field. In fact, reading linearly and chronologically is, in part, what this book proposes to resist. I have organized the chapters into three parts to highlight the recursivity of health’s narrative. Our attempts to manage health shape our definition of it, and the terms we use to define it govern how we manage it. Part 1 examines domestic health and personal conduct, whereas part 2 focuses on texts and characters that represent an unconventional view of health. Both parts alternate between chapters on prevention and chapters that seek to define health through maintenance. Part 3 departs from this model by turning to the realm of the professional (the physician and the physician’s stand-in), who must become adept at reading for health. Such narrative competence is an essential instrument of medical practice and medical education.
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