Literature has proved to be a generative object of inquiry for parsing the representational modes and cultural practices related to medicine and the body. Following the work of Rita Charon (2010, 2016) in narrative medicine, the use of literature has met with widespread appeal in medical curricula. Moreover, literary analysis has been increasingly deployed to yield additional contexts, affects, meanings, and diagnostic information that eludes allopathic medicine. These two inflections of literary work in medical humanities, however, tend to assume that literature and literary analysis produce generative knowledge or reveal what biomedicine fails to render visible. Olivia Banner (2017), for instance, has challenged that studying literature promotes empathy and self-reflection in practitioners. In broader terms, Rebecca Garden (2021) suggests that in the wake of COVID-19, not only have our outbreak narratives been challenged but also our fictions of belonging and unification.

This panel moves beyond the failures of literature to improve medical care and instead explores how it has contributed to medical misinformation. We begin with two papers that detail deceptive narratological frames pertaining to the coronavirus pandemic. Travis Alexander’s “Suspending the Question: China and the New Geopolitics of Immunity after Covid” explores two white/western responses to COVID-19 origin narratives: the wet market and the lab leak. The former casts China as home to primitive, queer entanglements of human and animal, reprising depictions of HIV emerging out of simian-human contact in central Africa. The notion of lab leak is equally invested in an ominous China, but here that terror springs from an excessive modernity. This presentation examines how the white/western imagination is impelled to hold these competing theories in indefinite suspension, which enacts a new immunological paradigm, one compatible with broader neoliberal imperatives toward flexibility and plasticity. Retaining these two incompatible theories marks a pedagogy for a new immunity and sovereignty optimized for an age of flexibility.

In “Germ Theory Denial and the First-Person Narrative,” Haejoo Kim unpacks the role of the first-person narrative in spreading health-related misinformation through the application of terrain theory, the idea that the (im)balance of the body is responsible for the development of illness. Terrain theory validates individual difference, whereas germ theory tends to generalize human bodies as interchangeable entities under pathogenic attack. Online advocacy for terrain theory mainly comprises first-person narratives, in which the individual’s intuitive connection to one’s own body trumps the expert yet distant gaze of a medical professional. Drawing on the recent developments in the field of health humanities, this presentation asks us to rethink our conventional appreciation of the individual voice as a subversive force in medicine by examining the centrality of the first-person voice in germ theory denial and its harms. Kim’s paper on contemporary resurgence of pre-germ theory etiological constructions segues into the final two papers, which detail the misinformational work of literature during the emergence of medical modernity.

Kathleen Powers examines the novella’s competing, rhetorical attempts to affix meaning to pain in “Speaking For Life: Language as Arbitrary Order in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych.” Ilych’s injury from a drawing-room fall and his subsequent illness is described amidst the imperfect enactment of ritual: a dinner with flawed plates or food, a card game where Ilych is handed the deck instead of being allowed to retrieve it himself, a courtroom performance with uncharacteristic mistakes. By revealing the arbitrariness of ritual–that rituals constitute one of many possible ways, or that they substantiate one of many possible orders–the novella also reveals language itself as an arbitrary order: an arrangement associating meaning and flesh, capable of deception or awareness in the public “lie” of Ilych’s healing or the understanding of death in the quiet of his thoughts.

Finally, Jennea Thomason’s paper “Francis Trollope’s Jessie Phillips: The Narrative Need for Quick Pregnancies” problematizes narrative misrepresentation, specifically the long nineteenth-century convention of quick pregnancies that contributes to misinformation and sexual injustice. Reproductive narratives often rely on the one-to-one correlation between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, whereby pregnancy occurs after one sexual encounter. Trollope uses the convention to present the physical and legal threat of pregnancy for women. Jessie’s quick pregnancy subjects her to the unjust new Poor Laws, a structural violence justified by a false medical narrative. This trope of quick pregnancy continues today through the typical scene of a character vomiting the morning after sexual intercourse to signal pregnancy. These inaccuracies contribute to erroneous public knowledge about the connection between sex, conception, and pregnancy, which in turn contributes to flawed reproductive laws regarding reproductive healthcare.