The Medical Humanities, Literature and Language

Virginia Langum (Umeå University)

Terry Walker (Mid-Sweden University)

1. Introduction
The origin of this special issue of the Nordic Journal of English Studies
on the Medical Humanities was a desire to highlight particular research
interests of the new editors of the journal and to demonstrate one of many
fields that span disciplines within English Studies: literature, culture and
language. A volume on the Medical Humanities was especially relevant as
we began our editorship during the Covid-19 pandemic: therefore, it is not
surprising that the pandemic informs or is the focus of some studies
included in this volume (see section 3). We take this as a starting point for
the discussion in this introduction, before turning our focus to the Medical
Humanities in general with regard to literature and language, and
especially to our work in the Medical Humanities in the Nordic countries.

2. The pandemic, literature and language

In 2020, it seemed everyone was either reading or reading about The
Decameron. Posts highlighted particular passages on the healthy
abandoning the sick and the rich skipping town. Virtual book clubs,
popular articles, and live Facebook lectures on the book were organized
and advertised. While the plague described in The Decameron has never
eluded cultural interest (e.g., Cooke 2009), it was experiencing a revival
in 2020 (e.g., Di Lauro 2020; Sherberg 2020; Vanamee 2020).
Meanwhile, new communities and cultural expressions were formed
out of loose association with this fourteenth-century short story collection.
The Library of Congress commissioned composers to create musical
responses to the pandemic on YouTube (‘The Bocaccio Project’ 2020).
The New York Times published ‘new short stories inspired by the moment’
(‘The Decameron Project’ 2020).
People were not only reading Boccaccio. Others turned to A Journal
of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, The Plague by Albert Camus, Love

Langum, Virginia, and Terry Walker. 2022. ‘The Medical Humanities, Literature
and Language.’ Nordic Journal of English Studies 21(2): 1–7.
2 Virginia Langum and Terry Walker

in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Pale Horse, Pale
Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. These books recurred frequently on lists
of ‘pandemic reading’ (e.g., Bortolot 2020; Metcalf 2020; Popomaronis
2020).
Why? Why were and are people drawn to fiction about historical
epidemics when they are going through one of their own? The book jacket
for the New York Times Decameron Project suggests, ‘when reality is
surreal, only fiction can make sense of it’. Literature is thought to do
something in the face of disease and crisis.
There is a growing body of research on bibliotherapy, or the use of
reading in treatment. One strand of this research concerns shared reading
and relief from chronic pain; another suggests that reading literature
improves theory of mind, or our capacity for empathy (e.g., Billington
2016). During Boccaccio’s time, reading was part of treatment for the
mind and body (Olson 2019; Langum 2018). Music and reading, sitting in
the garden, along with other things, affected the passions (or what we
would now call emotions), which had a physiological impact on the health
of the body. The recent pandemic brought this kind of embodied
relationship between reading fiction and either making sense of disease,
escaping from it, or surviving it (Downes and Römhild 2021). A Danish
and English led project Lockdown Reading queried ‘the way fiction
reading was changing during these sudden periods of social isolation,
suspended work, and increased awareness of our historical moment’
(Davies et al. 2022: 2).
The pandemic of course drew attention to the language we use to
describe medicine, disease and health. Familiar military conceptual
metaphors—ILLNESS AS WAR (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Bleakley 2017)
surfaced. Coronavirus units were ‘war zones;’ doctors and nurses were on
the ‘frontlines’. However, as some pointed out, this militaristic language
coincided with border closings, international grappling for equipment and
vaccines, and restricted civil liberties (e.g., Musu 2020), although the
causal effect of this language is debated (Benzi and Novarese 2022).
In 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary published several extra
updates to cover rapid linguistic change during the pandemic. New words
were added or infused with new meanings. Words added to the Oxford
English Dictionary in 2020 include ‘Covid-19,’ ‘comorbidity,’ ‘contact
tracer,’ and ‘frontliner’ (‘New Words List April 2020’; ‘New Words List
July 2020’). Words with extended meanings include ‘self-isolation’,
The Medical Humanities, Literature and Language 3

‘social distancing’, ‘infodemic’ and ‘Zoom’ (‘New Words List April

2020’; ‘New Words List July 2020).
As well as directly influencing the language, with new or adapted
words, concepts and metaphors, the pandemic has also lent impetus to
studies of the language of risk communication and how official
information is mediated to the public, which is taken up in two of the
contributions (see section 3). Investigating the language of official sources
when addressing the lay public plays a key role in helping communicators
improve the effectiveness of the message, which is vital in a national
emergency such as the pandemic.

3. Medical Humanities and English Studies

In 2020, the coronavirus renewed interest in particular books, words and
phrases or created them. However, in its lingering after-effects, long-
COVID may illuminate experiences of other chronic illnesses, such as
Lyme disease (Douthat 2021).
As the population ages, non-communicable diseases (or chronic
illnesses) increase. This global increase has pressing implications for
quality of life, social welfare and economy (e.g., Busse et al. 2010). The
increase and interest in chronic illness is marked in culture. Books that
chronicle first-hand accounts of living with chronic illness are flourishing
(e.g., George 2021; Miller 2021; O’Rourke 2022). The Medical
Humanities, including English literature and language, have much to
contribute to understanding chronic illnesses and other issues to do with
medicine, illness and health.
Within the Nordic countries, there has been tremendous growth in the
Medical Humanities in the past few years. These include dedicated
centres, networks, journals, courses and academic positions. English
literature and language are part of this development.
This Special Issue illustrates the multi-faceted approaches the study of
English can contribute to understanding of health, medicine, and the
experience of health and illness. Godelinde Gertrude Perk makes an
explicit connection between our experience of Covid lockdowns with the
experience of medieval anchorites, medieval religious people who lived
solitary, walled-in existences. She investigates understandings of
anchoritic physical and mental health, using methods from cognitive
behavioural therapy. Eric Pudney examines the representation of
witchcraft and the blood pact in the early modern play, The Witch of
4 Virginia Langum and Terry Walker

Edmonton. In his analysis, he combines early modern medical theory and

contemporary models of addiction to examine the blood pact as a kind of
addiction. Virginia Langum investigates what is at stake in the aetiology
and treatment of disease. Through the nineteenth-century case of health
travel to Madeira for consumption, she considers how science shaped
prejudice that may linger in the present. Katarina Gregersdotter probes
issues of objectivity and power in the clinical encounter as represented in
Margaret Atwood’s neo-Victorian novel Alias Grace. Ultimately, the
doctor fails to embody his ideals of science, and Grace controls her own
story. Jens Kirk makes a compelling argument for marrying the Medical
Humanities with environmental or ‘green humanities’. He applies recently
identified mental health impacts of climate change, such as solastalgia and
ecological PSTD, to a close reading of Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s Silt
Road: The Story of a Lost River. The linguistic contributions in this
volume consider medical discourse of historical periods and of the present
day. The first of these, by Jukka Tyrkkö, Pauline Alkenäs, Esme
Richardson-Owen and Johannes Widegren, complements previous
research on the use of the term symptom in early modern English medical
discourse by examining its use in non-medical contexts, using the 1.4-
billion-word EEBO TCP v3 corpus. A combination of manual
classification and computational topic modelling reveals some unexpected
results, such as how quickly the term was adopted from vernacular medical
texts for use in non-medical writing, used synonymously with sign or
token. Metaphorical uses of symptom were found in religious and
institutional contexts. In the contribution by Elena Glotova and Marlene
Johansson Falck metaphors are in focus, namely how these are used to
describe the sounds of tinnitus in nineteenth-century medical records. The
authors show how the metaphors used reflect the patients’ environment,
and the importance of these accounts for understanding and treating
tinnitus. Turning to studies of the present day, Anna Justine Sochacka
uses Positive Discourse Analysis to examine the discourse strategies used
in four TEDx Talks by women with autism. The study highlights the
impact of treating people with autism as ‘less than’, and of dividing
patients into ‘high’ and ‘low functioning’, and instead promotes
neurodiversity, which argues that autism is not an intellectual impairment
but a natural variation of brain development. Aage Hill-Madsen presents
a study of the comprehensibility of medical texts directed at a lay public,
using six European Assessment Report summaries that each report on a
The Medical Humanities, Literature and Language 5

specific medical product and the results of clinical trials. Focusing on the
semantic density and semantic gravity of these texts, he finds that these
texts may be challenging to reader groups unaccustomed to reading
conceptually abstract texts. Ying Wang’s contribution focuses
specifically on risk communication, examining the language of Covid-19
press briefings by the UK government. She uses Structural Topic
Modelling (cf. Tyrkkö et al.), revealing that topics were related to two key
areas. The approach also facilitated the identification of high-frequency
words associated with key topics, reflecting the use of simple everyday
language with a positive prosody in the government’s emergency risk
communication practice.
We hope this Special Issue will encourage further investigations into
these and other areas within the Medical Humanities. We would also like
to take this opportunity to thank the previous editors of the Nordic Journal
of English Studies, Karin Aijmer and Chloé Avril, for their dedication to
promoting English Studies in the Nordics.

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The Medical Humanities, Literature and Language 7

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