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Title |
From Patients, Back to People with Stories: Humanistic Care in the Medical Essays of Abu and Wu Nimin |
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Author |
Li, Hsin-Lun |
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Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Central University |
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Abstract |
This article focuses on two Taiwanese medical writers born after 1980 and their first book of medical essays, Abu's Secret Handbook of Interns and Wu Nimin's Private Medicine, respectively. The two writers have commonalities in combining medical and literary narratives, so this paper will analyze them from three aspects: nostalgia, human reappearance, and medical-disease interchange. Secret Handbook of Interns is a tribute to Wang Yijia's Intern's Handbook of the 1990s, and thus begins the return of the entire book, from the era of witch doctors, doctors during the Japanese rule era, to the "medical good old days" before the invention of large-scale medical equipment. The former is a tribute to Wang Yijia's Intern's Handbook of the 1990s, and thus begins the return of the entire book, from the era of witch doctors, doctors during the Japanese rule period, to the "good old days of medicine" before the invention of large-scale medical equipment. The fundoscopes and stethoscopes in the text are symbols of return, in response to the advances in medical technology and the tense relationship between doctors and patients today. Abu reads a "face" with special symbolic meaning from the patient's medical record, while Wu Nimin puts the patient back into the script of his own story through photographs and home furnishings. Not only do they demonstrate their sensibility to the patient's story, but they also flesh out the "person" of these identities and emotional histories with more details and literary techniques. In this way, the perspective shifts from biomedical observation to immersion in the patient's story, deepening Literary Narrative in Medical Essays. Finally, Abu and Wu Nimin describe in detail the process of the doctor's illness and medication, demonstrating the aesthetics of the dual-voice narrative of medicine and illness, while also using the metaphor of illness in the landscape to show the everyday nature of illness, revealing that the doctor is also a patient, providing an image of the doctor that is different from the one in the Pathography. |
