Summary:
Devan Stahl’s opening essay in this unusual
book explores the tension between her lived experience of being diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis (MS) in her twenties and her physicians’ biomedical
descriptions of it. While that tension is a familiar theme in patients’
narratives, Stahl’s approach is fresh and generously collaborative. Stahl, a
bioethicist, focuses her brief narrative on her uneasy hours inside MRI
machines and with clinicians who read the images. Stahl encouraged her sister,
artist Darian Goldin Stahl, to transmute her physicians’ diagnostic tools into
printmaker’s works, which bring personal meaning and sisterly solidarity to
Devan’s experience. Devan then invited Darian and four humanities scholars to
write reflective commentaries on her narrative, Darian’s images, and the
commentaries themselves. The result is a richly layered, multi-vocal reflection
on what Devan Stahl has accepted as “the dark gift of bodily frailty” (xxvii).
Darian Stahl’s prints were inspired by the
drawings of Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius that the sisters admired.
Unlike their modern counterparts, the older images placed bodies in humanly
built and natural environments that are rich with metaphor and theological
implications. Darian’s photographic silkscreened and stone lithographic prints,
some of which accompany her essay, imaginatively relocate her sister’s MRI
scans in domestic spaces that suggest both Devan’s present state: her spine
captured in a glass kitchen jar. And her future: a ghostly figure (actually Darian’s)
at the base of the staircase that Devan will someday have trouble climbing. Making
art became an act of caregiving.
The scholarly essays affirm that a single
diagnosis can set in motion processes of interpretation in the context of
family, community, academic discipline, and culture. But in this context, they too are expressions of caring for Devan. Literary and health
humanities scholar Therese Jones writes that Stahl’s narrative “testifies to
[her] hope of transcending or at least managing the alienation and incoherence
of a disrupted life” (49). Literature professor Kirsten Ostherr links the Stahls’
collaborative projects with the patient empowerment movement, where creative
expression offers one way to resist “the technomediated patient narrative”
(71). Two of Devan Stahl’s theological studies professors contribute the
remaining essays. Ellen T. Armour believes that the Stahls’ projects suggest
the value of engaging the medical humanities in pastoral practice and vice
versa, especially to challenge biomedicine’s claims to mastery and its
“disavowal of vulnerability” (89). Jeffrey P. Bishop, who is also a physician,
understands a patient’s position within the asymmetric power of medicine. Yet
he also resists “the power ontology that animates so much of the West” (102).
He offers instead a vision of accepting “the dark gift” of the fragility of the
body, which can be both humbling and liberating (105). Viewing one of Darian’s
images, he writes, “calls me out of myself” (105).
In Devan Stahl’s final reflection on her
colleagues’ commentaries and her sister’s art, she concludes that sharing her
experience has revealed both a “power in submission” and her responsibility to
other patients (112). Her discovery leads her to a “new image” of herself and acceptance
of Bishop’s observation: “Flesh calls the self into question” (115, 103).
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