Narrative Medicine as an Ancient Practice

Bullitt Club Lecture Series Presents

Janet Downie
Associate Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Classics

Narrative Medicine as an Ancient Practice

Hybrid event
In-person: Roper Hall, Room 4302
Virtual via Zoom: REGISTER for this event

Lecture

In this talk Downie will look at three idiosyncratic examples of medical narrative from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds: a letter exchange filled with details of the correspondents’ aches and pains; a personal diary of illness and divine healing; and a funerary inscription in which a father and mother record the details of their child’s fatal illness. These ancient medical texts – all intended for publication – challenge modern readers to think about the relationship between illness and aesthetics. New directions in narrative medicine (Y. Liatsos; cf. A. Kleinman, R. Charon) offer some possible avenues of interpretation, with their emphasis on aesthetic practices of close-reading and slow-looking, and on narrative process rather than interpretive closure.

Speaker

Janet Downie’s research focuses on Greek literature and literary history, especially of the Roman Imperial period. She has published on ancient rhetorical practice and theory, authorial self-construction, discourses of the body in the Greco-Roman world, the rhetoric of religious practice and experience, and spatial and material perspectives in ancient literature. At UNC she teaches ancient Greek language and literature at all levels, from introductory to advanced, including prose composition and graduate seminars on Imperial Greek literature and the Greek novel.