E41 On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Description: 

An immersive reading of On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf with reflection on language, health humanities and bipolar disorder.

Website:

https://anauscultation.wordpress.com

Work:

Excerpts from On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand-new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. […] Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mighty Prince with the moths' eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

References:

On Being Ill: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1500221h.html#ch3 

Bantel C, Sörös P. On pain - Virginia Woolf and the language of poets and patients. Br J Pain. 2021 Nov;15(4):497-500.

Munday I, Kneebone I, Newton-John T. The language of chronic pain. Disabil Rehabil. 2021 Feb;43(3):354-361. 

Pett S. Rash Reading: Rethinking Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill. Lit Med. 2019;37(1):26-66. 

Dalsimer K. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Am J Psychiatry. 2004 May;161(5):809. 

Koutsantoni K. Manic depression in literature: the case of Virginia Woolf. Med Humanit. 2012 Jun;38(1):7-14.

Bazin, N. T. (1994). Postmortem diagnoses of Virginia Woolf's 'madness': The precarious quest for truth. In B. M. Rieger (Ed.), Dionysus in literature: Essays on literary madness (pp. 133-147). Bowling Green State University Popular Press.