Writing Illness Workshop

This workshop brings together historians of medicine and literary scholars to investigate how self-care and nursing of sick family and friends influenced Germany’s 19th-century women writers, in particular, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Bettine von Arnim.  

Topics addressed:  

• Relation of soma and psyche  
• Self-care, self-discipline, and self-estrangement  
• Quotidian dimensions of myopia, fever, exhaustion, and headaches   
• Dietetics  
• Physical process of writing  
• Atmospheric impacts on health
• Posture and Walking   
• Homeopathy (since both women were avid proponents)  
• How medical texts generate and categorize knowledge and writing about the body  
• Mutability and suffering in nature  
• Poetics of Micro-perceptions   
• Grief and Death  

Researchers:

Thomas Wortmann (Mannheim), Martha Helfer (Rutgers), Vanessa Höving (Hagen), Martin Dinges and Marion Baschin (Bosch Institute for the History of Medicine). 

The cross-disciplinary approach of this workshop highlights collaboration in the medical humanities, disability studies, feminist studies, life writing, and 19th-century cultural studies.

This workshop draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.