A foundational text of the medical humanities, The Wounded Storyteller (1995) examines the postmodern desire to voice one’s illness and thereby reclaim one’s body in the face of chronic disease. It is a fascinating account of the subjective experience of illness and the ethical imperative to adapt to the changes brought upon the body by a disease and its treatment.
Frank borrows from postcolonialism to characterize the shift in the authority to speak of a disease (the physician’s colonizing authority) toward a person’s own authority to voice their illness (postcolonial resistance). He also shows how ill people benefit from this act of resistance by sharing their experience or relating with other people going through similar challenges. Instead of handing over their fate to an authority figure (their doctor), they become active participants in their treatment and “new” life.
Although the book is specifically interested in the subjective narration of chronic diseases, it is nevertheless interesting to apply Frank’s analysis of the modernist-postmodernist divide to ongoing debates on vaccination. The distrust of medical advice on vaccination in favor of information championed by certain oral networks of “alternative facts” (social media, editorials masquerading as news) can be seen as an extension of postmodernity’s capacity to disrupt modernity’s claims to objective knowledge, even in its scientific guise. Or perhaps especially in relation to science, since its empirical methods make it resilient to ideological distortion.
The irony is not lost on this reader of how an act of postcolonial resistance seems to have been co-opted by many who would reject the very notion or its historical necessity. In the postmodern disruption of vaccination, narrative authority has once again shifted, this time from medical discourse on the virus and its effects on the body, to a narrative of control over one’s body despite the virus’s deleterious effects on a multitude of bodies.
Rejecting medical advice on vaccination in the same way as people react to chronic disease, i.e. wrestling away authority from experts in the name of one’s own experience, however, will not help those adapting to “long COVID.” Their voicing of their enduring illness will function along the same lines as those described by Frank. In this sense, The Wounded Storyteller cannot be read simply as a diatribe against medical expertise. Instead, it must be understood as a blueprint for the ongoing tension between a person’s experience of their chronic illness and a physician’s knowledge of the scientific underpinnings of the disease and of its treatments.