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i
THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO

THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL
HUMANITIES
9781350197305_pi-408.indd i 10-Jun-22 12:51:06 PM

ii
9781350197305_pi-408.indd ii 10-Jun-22 12:51:07 PM

iii
THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO

THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL
HUMANITIES
Edited by
Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran
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iv
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran and contributors, 2022
The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identiﬁed as Authors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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v
CONTENTS
A cknowledgments viii
1 Introduction: Toward a Medical-Environmental Humanities. Why Now? 1

Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran
Part I Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine,

Graphic Medicine and Environmental Texts, Virology, Grey Ecology,
and Ecopsychology
2 Narrative Knowing and Narrative Practice: Opportunities for Reciprocal Learning

across Science-Facing Humanities 13
Eric Morel
3 Black Lives Matter in Flint, Michigan: Narrative Medicine and Ecocriticism in Goliath
and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 27
Mita Banerjee
4 Graphic Medicine and Ecological Consciousness: Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life 41
Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Chinmay Murali
5 Fungi Umwelt 51
Maria Whiteman
6 Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses 63

Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan
7 The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction 73

Lars Schmeink
8 Climate Change and Grief: How to Mourn a Mammoth in Alice Major’s “Welcome to
the Anthropocene” 83
Tathagata Som
9 Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities 97

Samantha Walton
vi Contents
Part II Environmental Toxicity and Public Health
10 Pathogenic (Auto)Ecologies: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Mechanisms in

Environmental Autobiography 117
Sofia Varino
11 Toward an Ethics of Transcorporeality and Public Health in Taiwanese

Ecopathodocumentary 131
Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai
12 Slow Violence, Environmental Toxins, and Systemic Racism: Revisiting Lorde’s

Cancer Journals in the Twenty-First Century 143
Heather Leigh Ramos
13 “Reframing Care” in the Age of a Novel Corona Virus: Food as Medicine on the
Farms of Two Physician-Farmers 157
Kathryn Yalan Chang
14 Poetry and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: Metabolic Pathways of Flesh 171
Nikoleta Zampaki
Part III Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota
15 Health, Disease, and the Body in Ecofeminist Theory: Entangled Vulnerabilities 185
Susanne Lettow
16 A Gut Feeling: The Emergence of Human Microbiota Conservation in the Peruvian

Amazon 199
Jorge Marcone
17 Performing Damaged Land-/Bodyscape in the Niger Delta: Transcorporeal

Explorations of Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil, but It Was Blood 211
Henry Obi Ajumeze
18 Scapegoating in Times of Pan-Epidemic: Mimesis, Identity Crisis, and the

Buddhist Phármakon 223
Chia-ju Chang
19 Fighting the Spread of Diseases with Words: From Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947) to
Tony Hillerman’s The First Eagle (1998) 235
Françoise Besson
20 From the Clinical to the Ecocultural: Literature, Health, and Ethnoecomedicine 251
Animesh Roy
Contents vii
Part IV Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergences of

Environment, Health, and the Arts
21 Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment 263

Raghul V. Rajan
22 Health and Hygiene Discourses in the Early Twentieth Century: The Making of a
Modern Odia Body 277
Animesh Mohapatra and Jyotirmaya Tripathy
23 (Un)sustainable Ecology: Modern and Indigenous Approaches to Health Care in

Amazônia 293
Marcos Colón
24 Nature and Traditional Medicine in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Things Fall
Apart 317
Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu
25 The Tales of Chinese Herbs: Rethinking Environmental Medicine through

Documentaries on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) 327
Kiu-wai Chu
26 Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian

Poetry: “Into the Sap Stream” 347
John Charles Ryan
27 Turkish Classical Song Lyrics and Related Idioms for a Literary Therapy for Curing
Ecodepression: An Ecological Cognitive Semantic Approach 363
Fazila Derya Agis
28 Expressing Concepts of Environment through Concepts of Madness in Some Irish

Literature: Astray at Home 375
Tess Maginess
29 Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet 391

You Don’t Know What You Got ’Til It’s Gone 391
Scott Slovic
The Gasping Turtle and Other Hypoxia Narratives: Prana in a Threatened World 393
Swarnalatha Rangarajan
Dying to Breathe: Fear as a Comorbidity in the Desert 397
Vidya Sarveswaran
L ist of C ontributors 403

I ndex 409
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to place on record the invaluable editorial assistance provided by Ms. Ranjani
Srinivasan and Ms. Ritu Jangird.
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1
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Toward a Medical-

Environmental Humanities.
Why Now?
SCOTT SLOVIC , SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN , AND VIDYA SARVESWARAN
There seems to be a universal human tendency to take good health—and other fortunate blessings—
for granted. When we’re young and energetic, when our lives appear to be progressing without a
hitch, we may be inclined to ignore the inevitable frailty of our physical being and the potential for
psychological distress and despair. Life without friction is not conducive to pause and reflection,
you might say.
For better or worse, we accrue friction as our lives unfold. Through natural wear and tear
or through the unanticipated occurrence of injury or illness, all of us, at one point or another,
experience physical and/or mental challenges. This may be when we finally realize our bodies and
minds require attention and care. In other words, recognizing our vulnerability is a process of
becoming aware, or more deeply aware, of our very existence.
Much the same trajectory seems to occur with our awareness of the natural world, or at least this
may have been the case prior to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of the modern environmental
movement, which is crisis-focused and is predicated on a declensionist narrative: the formerly
Edenic planet has declined from its one-time purity (and health) as a result of human activity.
Arguably, the vulnerability of the natural world, ranging in scale from the threats experienced by
individual organisms to infirmity on the biospheric scale, is the subtext of nearly all contemporary
environmental thought and policy.
The parallel between human health and unhealth and that of the natural world has long been
recognized in popular culture. We can see the rubric of health and medicine, like that of militarism,
woven into the fabric of our environmental consciousness. NGOs and for-profit companies seek to
“heal” the Earth and “defend” our natural resources: see Healing the Earth, Inc., and the Natural
Resources Defense Council, as cases in point. More recently, and with a certain sense of irony,
journalists have noted that the Covid-19 pandemic may be “healing the earth” by reducing our
species’ carbon footprint, at least temporarily.
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2 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
Perhaps one of the most meaningful theoretical angles that supports the parallel analysis of
human and planetary health is the development of precarity theory, based on the early work
of Judith Butler and others, and developed more recently by Pramod K. Nayar in such books
as Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017) and
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019). The earlier book about Bhopal,
India, argues that the terrible Union Carbide chemical accident of 1984 has continued to haunt
society (both locally and globally) for more than thirty years, characterizing Bhopali lives and
stimulating public concern about the dangers of industrial society and the unethical practices of
multinational corporations in externalizing the risks and costs of their activities. Nayar articulates
both aesthetic and psychological dimensions of the aftermath of the 1984 disaster, and in doing
so, he helps to create a framework for a broader medical-environmental analytical paradigm in
the environmental humanities, one that illuminates the inextricable linkages between human and
environmental health and frailty. Just as Nayar shows how various cultural representations of
vulnerable Bhopali lives have the potential to enhance public awareness of ongoing ecological and
biopolitical threats in the context of industrial activities in specific parts of the world, the growing
field of humanities-based medical-environmental studies not only describes situations of precarity
endured by human and natural communities but also offers prescriptions for remedying or at least
mitigating these threats. In his more recent book, Nayar explicitly states that “the precariat” (those
who experience precarity) includes not only diverse human beings but also nonhuman subjects. He
argues that “ecological disaster and eco-apocalypse along with different states of ecoprecarity are
central to contemporary ‘environmentality’,” the term Lawrence Buell used in 2005 to describe “the
modes through which literary and cultural texts—from cinema to fiction—engage with ecological
issues and concerns” (7–8). Ecoprecarity highlights the “contingent nature” of the earth, what
Nayar calls “the beauty, fragility, and singularity of the planet we inhabit,” which “we stand to lose
if we do not take care of our only home” (2019: 9–10).
This handbook emerges implicitly from the spirit articulated in Nayar’s recent work that
explores the shared precarity of human and nonhuman life on the earth. The essays collected
here trace the intersections between ecocriticism (and other subfields within the environmental
humanities) and the medical humanities, shedding light on the ways in which literature and other
forms of cultural expression address our understanding of human minds and bodies within the
context of the physical environment. Theories of disease, disrepair, treatment, recovery, and health,
from various cultures, point to the diversity of potential approaches to the intersection between
the medical and environmental humanities at the heart of this project. In addition to the obvious
(and scarcely perceptible) physical aspects of disease and contamination, in the twenty-first century
we must learn to understand the mental health implications of climate change, the anxiety caused
by increasingly toxic environmental conditions, and the overarching challenges of facing vast, slow
processes that jeopardize not only the more-than-human world but also our own safety. The essays
in this book aim to reveal our ecological predicament as a simultaneous threat to human health.
Nayar’s attention to the biopolitical aspect of public health—the idea that a person’s status in
society is deeply linked to that person’s physical condition—aligns closely with the approaches
emphasized in another foundational volume that paved the way for this project: Sarah Jaquette Ray
and Jay Sibara’s Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory
(2017). Those who are most vulnerable to illness or disability caused by industrial disasters such
as the Union Carbide leak in Bhopal are the people who live near or downwind/downstream from
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INTRODUCTION 3
industrial sites or locations where various kinds of waste are stored. Others forms of vulnerability,
as Ray and Sibara explain, are those where social class or immigration status, including the lives
of migrant farmworkers, results in particular exposure to hazardous labor conditions. Attention
to the ability-disability spectrum facilitates critique of some of the underlying assumptions of
environmentalism, such as the idea that robust physical activity is the “normal” way to experience
the natural world. Just as Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier helped to raise awareness
of the varieties of environmental thought represented by the categories of “full-stomach” and
“empty-belly” worldviews, the linkage between disability studies and the environmental humanities
sensitizes readers to the varieties of “environmental bodies” and the implications of this diversity
for human experience of the physical environment.
Many of the chapters collected here explicitly or indirectly build upon recent theoretical work
in the fields of material ecocriticism and affective ecocriticism. In their introduction to the 2014
volume Material Ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann state that “the ‘material
turn’ [in ecocriticism] is an extensive conversation across the territories of the sciences and the
humanities and embraces such fields as philosophy, quantum physics, biology, sociology, feminist
theories, anthropology, archeology, and cultural studies, just to name a few” (2). While Iovino and
Oppermann do not name medicine and public health explicitly here, it is clear from early examples
of material ecocriticism, such as Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the
Material Self (2010), that the medical ramifications of our “transcorporeal” connections with the
physical world are essential foci of this material turn. More recently, with the 2018 collection
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino
have formally established a subfield of ecocritical analysis that highlights the psychological aspects
of human experiences in relation to the physical environment, often emphasizing the clinical (or
therapeutic) features of this psychological territory. This recent interest in psychological ecocriticism,
in its focus on emotion, differs from the psychological ecocriticism that scholars such as Scott
Slovic, in Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992) and other articles, have long been
practicing and from the recent studies of readers’ attitudes toward environmental experience and
other species that have begun emerging in the empirical research of Wojciech Malecki, Matthew
Schneider-Mayerson, and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Contributors to Affective Ecocriticism address
such psychological conditions as anxiety, solastalgic distress, homesickness, ecophobia, and grief.
Sarah Jaquette Ray’s article for the collection, “Coming of Age at the End of the World: The
Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula,” overlaps with the approach
developed in her 2020 monograph A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool
on a Warming Planet. This work, in turn, builds upon the tradition of psychological ecocriticism
pioneered by such publications as Mark Allister’s work on “relational autobiography” in Refiguring
the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography (2001) and Susan Rowland’s explanation
of the psychology of human estrangement from nature in The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature,
Evolutionary Complexity and Jung (2011). Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary
U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014) draws together both the psychological and bodily
dimensions of “sickness,” as represented in the fictional narratives of such authors as David Foster
Wallace and Leslie Marmon Silko, as a way of exploring how literature encourages readers’
environmental consciousness.
This handbook is divided into four major sections: Part I, Conceptualizing
Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine, Graphic Medicine and Environmental
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 3 10-Jun-22 12:51:07 PM

Texts, Virology, Gray Ecology, and Ecopsychology; Part II, Environmental Toxicity and Public
Health; Part III, Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota;
and Part IV, Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergence of Environment,
Health, and the Arts. The general tilt of the collection is from textual and medical theory to the
conjunction of pollution, toxicity, and public health; to varieties of land-body entanglement; and
finally to traditional, relatively localized cultural expressions of the convergence of medical and
environmental philosophies.
The book opens with Eric Morel’s tracing of the intersections between econarratology and
narrative medicine, which he sees as an opportunity to create broader avenues for interdisciplinary
collaboration in the environmental humanities. The particular focus for Morel’s chapter is the
role of narrative in bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences. Using the example
of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a citizen science project that has
been operating along the American shoreline from Alaska to California for nearly two decades,
he finds that stories told by citizen participants in the project have been particularly interesting in
how they seem to have enabled volunteers to think about bird and human death, approaching a
topic (mortality) of particular importance in both the environmental and medical humanities. He
proposes the idea of “citizen econarratology” as a new way of collecting stories from volunteers
and professional scientists in both environmental and, potentially, medical contexts. Mita Banerjee’s
analysis of a well-known public health and environmental justice crisis—the case of contaminated
drinking water and associated health problems in Flint, Michigan—follows directly from Morel’s
study. Banerjee articulates the theory and methodology of narrative medicine in her study,
critiquing the scope of “stories of illness” in that they often fail to encompass and validate the full
dimensionality of people’s lives, beyond their status as victims of an illness. Sathyaraj Venkatesan
and Chinmay Murali push the boundaries of medical and ecological narrative by exploring an
innovative ecopathological discourse in the medium of comics. In particular, they focus their study
on Paula Knight’s graphic memoir, The Facts of Life, which raises the idea of planting trees as a
way of coping psychologically with infertility. The graphic medium offers new opportunities for
representing the subjective dimensions of illness and ecological engagement. Maria Whiteman’s
chapter takes connectivity in a very different direction, considering fungi (mushrooms) as a nexus
of philosophical, medical, ecological, and cultural “interconnectivity.” In “going fungal” (allowing
herself to be “overwhelmed and overtaken” by the world of mushrooms), Whiteman finds herself
thinking deeply about what it means to live together on the planet with other organisms, asking
fundamental questions about “health” and “well-being.” “How do we begin putting these terms
into context in a world we share with other organisms?” she asks. “Perhaps, we can imagine a
Mobius strip between ourselves and the ecosystem.” As a visual artist, she describes the process of
producing a series of photographs of mycelium (the structures through which mushrooms receive
nutrients from the environment), which she exhibited alongside living fungi.
Z. Gizem Yilmaz Karahan takes a step back to contemplate what we can learn from viruses
and other aspects of the pandemic in order to overcome the pitfalls of human exceptionalism and
the flawed ontological separation of human and nonhuman beings. Her survey of “multispecies
storytelling” (Donna Haraway’s term) in viral literature ranges from historical accounts of Machu
Picchu and other ancient civilizations to Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man. The Covid-19 pandemic
thus becomes an occasion to reconsider “relational ontologies,” a central theoretical issue in the
environmental humanities. Using the framework of “critical posthumanism,” Lars Schmeink also
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INTRODUCTION 5
addresses key lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that human life exists in relation to other
life forms and that we must “become-with” these nonhuman phenomena. Schmeink adopts Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen’s term “grey ecology” to describe the “disanthropocentric” relationships between
phenomena, or “objects,” beyond human understanding, and he turns to zombie texts such as
Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later and Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead, among others,
in order to demonstrate what a posthuman reading might look like. The “medical” subtext of such
stories is often indirectly represented in these works, which are set either in the aftermath of human
disappearance (following the onset of a catastrophic contagion) or during the process of human
extinction. What is critical to recognize, in any case, is how posthumanism and grey ecology enable
readers and viewers of zombie texts to appreciate the decentering of the human.
While several chapters in this opening section emphasize physical threats to human health and
survival posed by pandemics and related forms of contagion, Tathagata Som turns to what may
be the single greatest overarching health risk: climate change. He argues that medical humanities
has yet to confront this challenge or to consider the discourse of climate grief, which is a means
of addressing the mental health effects of climate crisis. Som focuses his study on Alice Major’s
“Welcome to the Anthropocene” as an example of “reparative poetry,” not only revealing key
flaws in human thinking and action that have contributed to climate change, but also showing
how “mourning the damage already done can pave the way for the prevention of damage yet to
be done.” Responding to Renee Lertzman’s observation in Environmental Melancholia (2015) that
societal failure to respond to catastrophic environmental change causes apathy and hopelessness,
Som claims that certain literary texts can teach us how repair our own emotional condition during
this time of anthropocenic despair. At the same time, he points out, following Judith Butler, that
effective mourning can bolster political activism, which may ultimately lead to more resilient
communities and have a material influence on the state of the world. This chapter, in its focus on
the conjunction of eco-depression, mourning, and reparation, brings the environmental humanities
into conversation with the “mental health humanities.” Along similar lines, Samantha Walton
addresses both mental health aspects of environmental experience and the use of literature in
achieving and recording recovery from psychological trauma. Walton, however, does not focus
her chapter specifically on psychological distress caused by environmental anxiety. Instead, she
puts forward the “eco-recovery memoir” as a means of recognizing the natural world as a “potent
agent capable of influencing mental health outcomes” more broadly. The examples she uses—
Luke Turner’s Out of the Woods, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun,
and Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar—address the concept of the “nature cure” (to use
Richard Mabey’s term) in response to a wide range of psychological conditions, from autism to
depression and sexual trauma.
Part II of the book turns toward a particularly ubiquitous concern in the Anthropocene, the
public health ramifications of widespread toxicity, a byproduct of industrialization. What we find in
these chapters are a variety of examples of how the environmental humanities seek to provide new
communication genres and vocabularies for registering and illuminating the medical consequences
of environmental contamination. Sofia Varino traces the intersections between the physical and
psychological experience of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) in several examples of “auto-
ecological” narratives, including Aurora Levins Morales’s memoir Kindling, the poetry of Peggy
Munson, and Susan Abod’s documentary films Homesick and Funny You Don’t Look Sick. She
argues that such MCS narratives call attention to an “environmentally charged politics of health
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 5 10-Jun-22 12:51:07 PM

and healing,” challenging the tendency to distinguish between “internal (physiological, genetic)
and external (social, environmental, epigenetic) models of illness and health.” Robin Chen-Hsing
Tsai identifies a specific textual mode—the “ecopathodocumentary”—that aims to overcome
public and governmental inattention to the public health problems caused by air pollution. This
is a spin-off from the genre Anne H. Hawkins has labeled the “ecopathography,” referring to an
“autobiography that recounts a person’s experience of illness or disease resulting from a toxic
environment.” Tsai asserts that “we live in an age of air pollution,” pointing to industrialization and
urbanization as the chief causes of this looming crisis. Using the familiar environmental frameworks
of “transcorporeality” (from Stacy Alaimo) and “slow violence” (from Rob Nixon [2011]), his
chapter analyzes, in particular, three Taiwanese ecopathodocumentaries: Scott Wen-Chang Chi’s
The Poisoned Sky, Chi Po-Lin’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, and Hsiao-Li Wang’s Particulate
Matters. Audre Lorde’s 1980 Cancer Journals emerged as a central text for scholars working in the
field of material ecocriticism when Alaimo emphasized its importance in Bodily Natures and other
studies, and Heather Leigh Ramos highlights not only the material biomedical aspects of Lorde’s
work but also its significance in showing how systemic racism contributes to health disparities and
environmental inequalities. Ramos’s chapter, which also applies Nixon’s concept of slow violence,
demonstrates the value of bringing together the medical and environmental humanities as a way of
reinforcing and shedding light on contemporary social movements, such as Black Lives Matter. The
public aspect of Lorde’s work is of particular importance to Ramos, who argues that Lorde relies
upon “visibility strategies to move from private suffering to coalition-building and organizing.”
Lorde’s work, claims Ramos, “provides us tools for resisting environmental and medical injustices
that disproportionately affect marginalized bodies, particularly Black women.” Kathryn Yalan
Chang’s study of two examples of “physician-farmers,” one from Taiwan and the other from New
Jersey in the United States, is relevant to the fungal angle of Whiteman’s essay from Part 1 in its
focus on the profound linkage between food and medicine. She also introduces the ethical idea
of “health disparities and social inequities in the food system” into her discussion, taking on the
social justice perspective that is frequently important in environmental humanities research. From
“worn-out soils” to “unhealthy bodies,” Chang and the physician-farmers she studies appreciate the
interwoven predicaments of the physical environment and the health of human communities, just
as other branches of the environmental humanities, including postcolonial ecocriticism, operate
on the premise of shared imperilment and protection of the human and nonhuman realms. Chang
invokes the Covid-19 pandemic as a way of highlighting the notion of a “global syndemic,” a
widespread concatenation of multiple crises, for which revamping human food systems may be
part of the solution. Nikoleta Zampaki proposes a new category of artistic expression that she calls
“Metabolic Poetics,” interweaving ecological and biomedical information as a way of vivifying
human metabolic processes, including the ways in which environmental toxins penetrate and
pass through our bodies. Her study highlights such work as Adam Dickinson’s poetry collection
Anatomic and Pinar Yoldas’s mixed-media artwork titled Ecosystem of Excess. This chapter, which
builds upon philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of “flesh,” shows how Metabolic Poetics
reveals the complex intersections between “nature and the body, science and culture, and biosphere
and Technosphere.”
Convergences, intersections—and now entanglements. Obviously, a handbook devoted to
bringing together two multidimensional disciplines, each devoted to positive societal impact, will
be rife with examples of vocabularies, methodologies, and perspectives coming together. Part III
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INTRODUCTION 7
foregrounds the rubric of multi-scalar entanglement as a dominant metaphor. In addressing the

concept of “entangled vulnerabilities,” Susanne Lettow extends the work of such ecofeminist scholars
and queer theorists as Julie Sze, Nina Lykke, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Y. Chen and emphasizes the
stratification, or inequality, of exposure to toxins and other environmental risks, defining “stratified
vulnerability” as a “material-semiotic” idea. She also underscores the point that “the vulnerability
of human bodies is closely entangled with the well-being of other living beings.” While all of the
chapters in this book demonstrate what academic administrators tend to describe as “use-inspired
basic research” to capture the combined exploration of fundamental ideas and pursuit of societal
applications, Jorge Marcone’s contribution is perhaps unique in its explicit engagement with the
groundbreaking Microbiota Vault project, which focuses on conserving diverse microbiota in order
to ensure the long-term health of humanity. Marcone’s work, based in Peru, analyzes the socio-
ecological aspects of Amazonian indigenous and mestizo stories in the contexts of food, nutrition,
and diet. Just as studies such as Lettow’s aim to recognize diverse experiences of medical-ecological
vulnerability, Marcone’s research and the broader concerns of the Global Microbiome Network
(GloMiNe) emerge from a sense of the vital, practical importance of recognizing and preserving
diversity, as reduced microbial diversity is an underlying factor of autoimmune diseases, metabolism
disorders, and autism spectrum disorder.
In keeping with the multi-scalar aspect of this section of the handbook, Marcone’s project
addresses the global health implications of safeguarding diverse microbiota. Henry Obi Ajumeze
approaches the medical-ecological question of scale in a rather different way by analyzing Nigerian
poet Nnimmo Bassey’s 2002 poetic manifesto We Thought It Was Oil, But It Was Blood. Working
with the familiar environmental humanities rubrics of slow violence and transcorporeality, Ajumeze
demonstrates how Bassey’s work simultaneously contemplates the scale of the Niger Delta landscape
and the scale of the human bodies affected by the injection of toxins through oil extraction.
The “entanglements” explored in this work include the landscape/bodyscape conflation and the
“neoliberal entanglements” of various corporations and governmental entities that are complicit
in the pollution-causing activities. A key function of the medical and environmental humanities is
to engage with harmful, unjust situations in the health and ecological spheres, and this is precisely
what we see in the work of Bassey and Ajumeze. Chia-ju Chang’s chapter also engages with medical-
environmental injustice, but in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using René Girard’s mimetic
and scapegoat theories, Chang argues that the Western subject tends problematically to externalize
and demonize disease and other species, leading to an emotionally cathartic but ultimately unjust and
unhealthy scapegoating of disease itself and possible carriers of disease. Working on various scales,
Chang explains how American responses to the coronavirus included reductive, counterproductive
finger-pointing toward other nations (namely, China), toward social “others” (Chinese Americans,
and members of other cultural groups), and toward other species (including the possible zoonotic
sources of the virus, bats and pangolins). She proposes the Buddhist concept of pharmakon as a
non-mimetic, non-dualistic alternative to the deeply engrained Western epistemology rooted in
mimetic dualism. Françoise Besson’s analysis of Albert Camus’s classic novel of disease, La Peste,
and Tony Hillerman’s more recent novel, The First Eagle, which takes place in Navajo country in
the American Southwest, revisits the questions of disease origin raised in Chang’s chapter, as she
explores questions of the spread of disease as represented European and American fiction. Much
as Chang concludes that it can be helpful to seek non-Western alternatives to such epistemologies
as Cartesian dualism, Besson finds hopeful solutions to contagion in the literature she discusses,
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particularly in the traditional, plant-focused healing ceremonies of the Hopi and Navajo people,
which are integrated into Tony Hillerman’s stories. Animesh Roy coins the term “ethnoecomedicine”
to describe the complex “entanglements” between biotic elements and sociocultural constructions
that guide indigenous theories of disease and healing. Roy points to a variety of South Asian and
African writings, including such works as Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, as a lens through which to understand the ecological, physical, and
psychological nexus of ethnoecomedicine.
Regional case studies from around the world are important in many chapters throughout this
volume, but specific cultural approaches to the conjunction of medical and environmental thought
are foregrounded in Part IV. The purpose of dedicating an entire section of the book to unique
cultural traditions is to drive home the plurality of significant cultural traditions that energize this
project of integrating the medical-environmental humanities. And although there are particular
reasons for pursuing such an integration at this time in history, as discussed below, this effort is not
new—in fact, in some societies there has never been a de facto separation of medical thought and
environmental thought. The following chapters reveal this vividly.
Raghul Rajan, for instance, introduces the ancient medical-ecological philosophy of Ayurveda
from the Indian subcontinent, which is based upon the premise that the human body is intrinsically
part of the universe, not separate from it. Rajan’s chapter articulates a philosophical system that
beautifully exemplifies the holistic convergence of human and environmental health that underlies
the concept of this handbook. From the abstract philosophical realm of Ayurveda in the previous
chapter, Animesh Mohapatra and Jyotirmaya Tripathy turn to the complex sociopolitical process
by which citizens and medical practitioners in the region of Odisha, on the eastern coast of India,
sought to balance indigenous medical knowledge systems with Western ideas about the body and
medicine during the early-twentieth-century period of British colonialism. Mohapatra and Tripathy
demonstrate a historical approach to understanding the challenges of balancing vernacular and
colonial medicine. Marcos Colón, along similar lines, examines a contemporary situation with the
Zo’é indigenous people from Pará State, Brazil, and a project underway to bring modern health
care to the Zo’é in the forest rather than requiring them to travel to the city for access to modern
medical treatment. Colón’s discussion of “culturality” and the practical efforts to reinforce the
forest-based lives of an indigenous community by bringing modern medicine to them in Amazonia
offers a novel approach to cultural preservation at a time when Western doctors are actively trying
both to cure physical ailments and protect native culture.
Literature is often a powerful lens into the cultural particularities of medical and environmental
thought, and this is the focus of Chinonye Ekwueme-Ugwu’s study of several examples of twentieth-
and twenty-first-century African (primarily West African) fiction. Ekwueme-Ugwu finds that the
there is a rich vein of medical environmentalism in African cultural traditions, but that nature-based
medical practices often compete with supernatural theories of wellness and healing. Chinese culture,
too, is famous for its intricate theories of herbal medicine and fundamental connections between
natural processes and the workings of the human body. Kiu-wai Chu relies upon documentary films
and comic sketches in his introduction to core concepts of traditional Chinese medicine. “Herbal
medicine” takes on a rather different meaning in John Charles Ryan’s study of Australian aboriginal
concepts of the interdependencies between human bodies and plant bodies. Other chapters in this
volume have used the key concept of transcorporeality, from the field of material ecocriticism,
to emphasize the vulnerability of human bodies to contaminants released into the environmental
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INTRODUCTION 9
through industrial activity. Ryan also uses the idea of transcorporeality, but in this case to clarify
the salutary aboriginal notion of human–plant inter- and transcorporeality, by which human bodies
exist in ways that are coextensive with other bodies that exist in nature. Ryan uses the work of
aboriginal poets to reveal and explain indigenous theories of human and environmental health.
Mental health also often has distinctive relevance to specific cultural traditions and histories.
Fazila Derya Agis explores this tracing the healing ecolinguistic elements in Turkish folk music
dating back to the Ottoman Empire, with a particular interest in how song lyrics emphasizing
natural metaphors (especially linked to animals and plants) help to ease cases of depression among
listeners. Tess Maginess relies on well-known examples of Irish poetry in order to think about the
motif of madness in connection with physical environments, with places, locating this work within
specific contexts of Irish history.
Readers of this book may ask, “Why now? Given that there is already a substantial history of
looking at the human mind and body in relation to the environment, why choose this moment
to explicitly seek to bring the medical and environmental humanities into concert as a common
framework for understanding human experience?” The answer may be both autobiographical
and historical. To be brazenly self-revelatory, as aging scholars with aging family members, our
sensitivity to our own physical conditions (from aching muscles to weakening eyes) and how these
affect our engagement with the world have awakened us to the profound relevance of medicine
to environmental thought and experience. We began discussing this project in 2019, prior to our
awareness of what would become the most significant public health crisis of our lifetimes: the
Covid-19 pandemic. Much of our work on this book has taken place during lockdown conditions
in India, and while fastidiously wearing a mask and practicing social distancing in the United States.
This introduction was drafted in Ürgüp, Turkey, during a national lockdown, while monitoring the
rise and fall of new cases of infection and numbers of new deaths. At the time of this writing, more
than 580,000 people have died from Covid in the United States, 270,000 in India.
In other words, we are now more acutely aware of the precarity of our own health and the mental
strains of prolonged anxiety and social isolation than ever before in our lives. Our experience of the
pandemic has driven home the inseparability of human health and environmental health, attaching
a resounding exclamation mark to the importance of this project. During the early months of
the pandemic, in 2020, Steven Hartman, Joni Adamson, Greta Gaard, and Serpil Oppermann
coordinated a special cluster of articles offering environmental humanities responses to this unique
public health crisis for the website Bifrostonline. In their introduction titled “Through the Portal of
COVID-19: Visioning the Environmental Humanities as a Community of Purpose,” they cite David
Quammen’s eloquent statement from his prescient book, Spillover (2011), on zoonotic disease: “In
fact, there is no ‘natural world,’ it’s a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world” (2020: 518).
In fact, our experience of this dramatic and traumatic pandemic has driven home to us that there
is no “human health” and “environmental health.” There is only health—and the absence of health.
There is only precarity, experienced admittedly in variable degrees according to just and unjust
social and economic systems, but an overarching and fundamental precarity that encompasses
all of us, regardless of nationality and ethnicity and species. Obviously, we did not welcome the
onset of the Covid pandemic as we worked on this book, but we quickly recognized that this
public health crisis reinforced the urgency of yoking together scholarly traditions—the medical
humanities and the environmental humanities—that had previously existed mostly in parallel but
largely independent spaces. We anticipate that this will no longer be the case.
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REFERENCES
Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Allister, M. (2001), Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography, Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press.
Bladow, K., and J. Ladino, eds. (2018), Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment,
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Buell, L. (2005), The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Hartman, S., J. Adamson, G. Gaard, and S. Oppermann (2020), “Through the Portal of COVID-19: Visioning the
Environmental Humanities as a Community of Purpose,” Bifrost Online. Available online: https://bifrostonl
ine.org/steven-hartman-joni-adamson-greta-gaard-serpil-oppermann/. Accessed May 19, 2021.
Houser, H. (2014), Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Iovino, S., and S. Oppermann, eds. (2014), Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lertzman, R. (2015), Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement, London: Routledge.
Lorde, A. ([1980] 2020), The Cancer Journals, New York: Penguin.
Nayar, P. K. (2017), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny, Lanham,
MD: Lexington.
Nayar, P. K. (2019), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge.
Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quammen, D. (2011), Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, New York: Norton.
Ray, S. J. (2020), A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Ray, S. J., and J. Sibara, eds. (2017), Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip
Theory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Rowland, S. (2011), The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung, London: Routledge.
Slovic, S. (1992), Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard,
Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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11
PART ONE
Conceptualizing
Convergence: Econarratology
and Narrative Medicine, Graphic
Medicine and Environmental
Texts, Virology, Grey Ecology,
and Ecopsychology
12
12
13
CHAPTER TWO
Narrative Knowing and Narrative

Practice: Opportunities for
Reciprocal Learning across
Science-Facing Humanities
ERIC MOREL
In opening a state-of-the-field essay for the American Comparative Literature Association on

the environmental humanities, Ursula Heise surveys a spate of emergent humanities initiatives
directing research in the prior two decades, succinctly describing the medical humanities among
them as “a new interest in how story-telling functions in medical contexts and how medical
issues are represented in literature, film, and the visual arts” (Heise 2014) before delving into
existing work and comparatist opportunities within the environmental humanities. The tasks
Heise lays out for environmental humanists are less defined by the embattled and “clichéd concept
of ‘interdisciplinarity’ ” (2014) and more by investigating various rhetorics, identifying and
investigating concepts across disciplines, translating humanistic research to other audiences, and
serving as the conceptual basis for cultural deliberation in the face of environmental concerns.
Capacious though that program is, it notably retains the second of the two tasks she ascribed
to the medical humanities while eliding the first: understanding “how story-telling functions in
[environmental] contexts” (2014). That gap is all the more surprising since Heise’s first book on
comparative postmodernisms, Chronoschisms (1997), was deeply informed by narrative theory,
and Heise has consistently remained one of ecocriticism’s most lively and persuasive attendants to
matters of form generally and narrative form in particular.
Heise’s proposals fall squarely within the second of three narratives about the humanities
surveyed by Howard Brody ([2009] 2011) in an essay that cautions against pursuing a semantically
overburdened project in the medical humanities. The humanities, he notes, are frequently invoked
to mean distinct and potentially conflicting things: a set of sometimes-related disciplines separated
and formalized into curricula, a Renaissance-inspired agenda of critical reflection toward wisdom,
and lastly a sort of friendly and compassionate space for appreciation and other forms of personal
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response. Heise is clearly willing to do away with the first, as she says outright that she prefers
the heading of environmental humanities, and there is no trace of the third in her suggestions.
But in falling so squarely into the area of critical reflection, her argument and her dismissal of
interdisciplinarity find themselves in danger of what Brody identifies as this second narrative’s
cerebral detachment, which risks collapsing back into the first narrative—as writing for the venue
of a comparative literature society also perhaps enacts.
My essay, then, proposes a kind of work within the environmental humanities that brings back
attention to storytelling in environmental contexts as a way to offer space for alternative humanist
work.1 Drawing directly from the work in the medical humanities of Rita Charon and narrative
medicine, I argue that environmental humanists’ expertise in narrative knowing has potential to
open interdisciplinary avenues of collaboration in environmental studies. I go on to repay the
medical humanities for their insight by suggesting how the environmental and medical humanities
as co-travelers can layer or extend concerns in narrative medicine. Before turning to my example
texts, which come from citizen science blog pages, it is worthwhile to elaborate on Charon’s case
for narrative knowing in the medical humanities and identify econarratology as a bridge for this
work into the environmental humanities.
NARRATIVE IN THE SCIENCE-FACING HUMANITIES

Although much doctoral training persists in training scholars who define their work within the
categories of period and nation that typify the humanities’ job market, humanist scholars can develop
attunement to a range of matters while engaging in the wide reading and analytical maneuvers
they undertake to enter their disciplines. Rita Charon’s work on narrative is premised on this
same observation, and her influential Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006)
lays out narrative theory’s potential applicability to contexts in her medical practice despite its
development from within studies of the novel. Specifically, those contexts included the interpretive
process of diagnosis based on patient accounts of their condition, as well as doctors’ often unvoiced
responses to the encounters that comprise patients’ treatment. For Charon and others in the medical
humanities, a simple but key warrant undergirding this interdisciplinary bridge was recognition
that the labels of “doctor” and “patient” were obscuring the shared humanity of both participants.
To see both parties as full people invited humanist training, as these full people are not immediately
known to one another but revealed through experience and narration. Based on close reading
practices drawn from literary study and narrative theory’s insights into elements of narrative form
and process, Charon was able to advocate for narrative as a means toward reflection capable of
demonstrably better care outcomes. She structures opportunities for storytelling in patient visits
and practitioner self-reflection both.
Similar opportunities for storytelling are possible in environmental contexts, even though
ecological crisis often lacks the clarity of doctor-patient relationships and even though the multispecies
entanglements of environmental challenges present many stakeholders humans cannot yet hear.
The opportunities arise in any number of scenarios when humans use narrative to communicate
with one another about the cause-and-effect dynamics of situations or about their own experiences
1
I would like to acknowledge and thank Benjamin Streeter and Matthew M. Low, who both provided feedback on an earlier
draft of this essay.
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NARRATIVE KNOWING AND NARRATIVE PRACTICE 15
engaging any of those situations. Environmental humanists already thinking along similar lines
here have included Scott Slovic (both independently in Going Away to Think [2008] and together
with Terre Satterfield [2004]), Kate Rigby (2015), and Candis Callison (2014), among others who
recognize practical benefits of even informal kinds of storytelling. The field of environmental
studies is actually replete with occasions of narrative knowing, but often the narratives are given
over to the social sciences as qualitative data to mine, not as themselves valuable knowledge. In this
chapter, I narrow my focus to the realm of citizen science; storytelling in citizen science projects
is still often underused or under-realized, but the interface that citizen science projects occasion
between publics and scientific researchers is a fruitful one for humanists to observe and elaborate.
The benefits of storytelling have garnered increased attention in the sciences generally, but
various studies of citizen science implicitly or explicitly suggest that storytelling has benefits for
facilitating connections between scientists, citizen science projects, and volunteers in particular.
Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo, for example, writing in Nature Methods, recommend to
their more general scientific audience that “stories have the capacity to delight and surprise and to
spark creativity by making meaningful connections between data and the ideas, interests and lives
of your readers” (2013: 687), and the appearance of such sentences in scientific journals already
heralds some readiness for interdisciplinary collaboration. Krzywinski and Cairo’s point finds
an echo in the citizen science–specific findings of researchers Arnold J. H. van Vliety, Wichertje
A. Bron, and Sara Mulder (2014), who advocate the use of mass media to communicate the work
of citizen science projects. They observe positive trends between projects able to form relationships
with journalists who recognized the scientists as tellers of engaging stories, on the one hand, and
stronger volunteer recruitment, engagement, and retention, on the other. And while their finding
that communicating their research helped generate wider interest may not be entirely surprising, it
is worthwhile to note that reading their study brings out that the process simply encouraged greater
dialogue and inquiry among the public, communication partners, and scientists—and these forms
of dialogue helped refine the shape of studies as well as further communications. The correlation
is neither simple nor direct, but encouraging well-informed storytelling encourages better science.
Connections between the environmental humanities and narrative medicine seem largely still
unbroached, but there has been an increased interest in narrative theory among environmental
humanists. That interest has given rise to the term “econarratology,” which covers various projects
and does not prescribe a single approach from within either ecocriticism or narrative theory, the
two subfields that it joins. Although a handful of environmental humanists and narrative theorists
had started publishing pieces with bibliographies that included scholarship from both areas of
study, it was Erin James who first used the term in The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and
Postcolonial Narratives (2015) and defined it so that it could encompass its breadth, writing that “it
maintains an interest in studying the relationship between literature and the physical environment,
but does so with sensitivity to the literary structures and devices that we use to communicate
representations of the physical environment to each other via narratives” (2015: 23). Perhaps even
more succinctly, James and Morel summarize that the term entails “paired consideration of material
environments and their representation and narrative forms of understanding” (2020: 1). Pairing
ecocritical work with narrative medicine would constitute a potential strand of econarratology,
then, and putting that pairing to work in citizen science projects would fit alongside efforts to
apply econarratology practically by Matthew M. Low (2020) and others. Like narrative medicine,
this econarratological work would draw from its humanist forebears to “recognize, interpret,
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and be moved to action by” (Charon 2001: 83) the experiences of citizen science volunteers and
scientists, encouraging and then reflecting on narrative telling toward greater care for matter and
life beyond the human.
Although it sometimes goes by other names (e.g., community-based monitoring, community
science, etc.), citizen science generally designates projects where ordinary people, as amateur
scientists, engage in data collection and sometimes analysis, usually as coordinated by or in
conjunction with academic researchers. The advertised benefits for such projects are several for
all parties involved, but most generally they benefit scientists by harnessing wider resources for
collection of data beyond the means of typical research teams, and volunteers in turn benefit from
increased felt agency within environmental problems, increased science literacy and transparency,
and new avenues of social connection (Toomey and Domroese 2013; Groulx et al. 2017). In addition
to the forms of connection generated among professional and volunteer scientists themselves, these
projects also connect various publics to scientific research either through their own blogs and other
social media appendages, or else through earned coverage in mainstream publications.2
Citizen science projects that dedicate website space to the stories of their volunteers are still
uncommon, likely because projects need to attain a certain scale and funding level before they
have the resources dedicated to producing such web content. It remains much more common
to have articles that generalize the volunteer experience or quote volunteers briefly as part of
larger developments in the project. The University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Coastal Research
Volunteers (CRV) program and the University of Washington’s Coastal Observation and Seabird
Survey Team (COASST), though, have websites with blog pages that engage in stories by and
about participants that will serve, for my purposes here, as insider “stories from practice” (Charon
2001: 84). As such, they suffice to make preliminary examples for what narrative knowing in
citizen science might look like and do.
ECONARRATOLOGY AS NARRATIVE CITIZEN SCIENCE

Narrative practice may offer citizen science a variety of insights, but foremost among them may
be opportunities for professional and citizen scientists to better know and understand one another
and their relationship. There have been many projects that stalled from problems of engagement
and retention, and such breakdowns have been attributed to multiple factors, including volunteers
losing sight of purpose or expressing doubtful feelings doubt about their data’s value (Frensley
et al. 2017). Lead scientists, meanwhile, for all their power and expertise, are recording higher and
higher rates of burnout and mental illness tied to their environmental work (Clayton 2018). These
circumstances should occasion investigation of “divides” (Charon 2006: 19) akin to those Charon
identifies between patients and doctors. In the context of citizen science, the divides that emerge
from these two posts are between the scientist experts in the projects and the citizen scientist
volunteers; these divides may not be as fraught as those in medicine, but they do have repercussions
for how scientific knowledge is shared through these projects’ work. Although only a small initial
2
Websites for popular science publications such as National Geographic (Ullric 2012) and Scientific American (2020) have
their own citizen science portals, whereas broader news venues more typically cover timely, specific projects. For instance,
see Busch (2013), Twilley (2016, 2018), Blakemore (2020), and Khan (2020). Projects with local foci are even more likely
to earn coverage in more local outlets; see Bush (2017).
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sample, two entries from the UNH’s Sea Grant site introducing an intern and spotlighting a lead
scientist involved in the project can serve to start this conversation.
One link from the CRV “Stories” page is titled “Oysters, horseshoe crabs, and Snapchat, oh my!”
(Burns 2017), and its teaser text reads, “Oysters, horseshoe crabs, and … Snapchat? Our Doyle
Fellow intern, Trevor, has been keeping busy this summer.” Particularly because it is linked from a
“Stories” page, a reader may reasonably expect a narrative account of Trevor’s summer. And the
entry is a narrative, though for the most part Trevor features only fleetingly in it. The first sentence
of the post gives an overview: “Over the last few weeks I have spent my fellowship working on
several projects with The Sea Grant and The Nature Conservancy” (2017). Then, in a similar style,
the next three paragraphs begin with sentences in the first person and summarizing a month’s work,
but the paragraphs themselves mostly consist of exposition explaining key parts of each task, such
as Snapchat and The Beaches Conference. There are, occasionally, still first-person statements, but
they are more evaluative than narrative (“I thought the conference was great”) (2017). For the most
part, then, Trevor’s account of the summer is largely externalized—he spotlights the project more
than his participation or agency in it.
This changes at the close of the third body paragraph. This paragraph begins like the others,
saying that Trevor’s most recent task was “helping” (2017) with a Nature Conservancy oyster
restoration program. As with other body paragraphs, Trevor notes the goals and methods of the
program before ending with the first use of first-person plural in the post: “We then placed the
cages into large tanks and added oyster spawn that was estimated to be 12.5 million oyster larvae”
(2017). Instead of the conclusion paragraph one might expect from what has been, up to this point,
a little bit like a five-paragraph essay, Trevor continues the narration across the paragraph break:
After the larvae settle out of the water column onto the shells, the being to grow [sic]. After a
few weeks, we took the cages out of the tanks and tied them onto a raft in Great Bay for them
to grow large enough to see them. This week we took cages out of the water to count the spat,
baby oysters, on the shells of some cages to get a subsample of the success rate of the spawn
settling. For the rest of the summer the cages will be delivered to volunteers around Great
Bay that will monitor the growth of their cage from their docks. At the end of the summer
the oysters will be added to the existing oyster reef in Great Bay to help restore the depleted
population. (2017)
The first-person plural pronoun never has a clear antecedent, which is itself interesting because it
marks a sense of involvement in a larger project where Trevor’s “I” becomes undistinguished from
the larger project (2017). Although the “Snapchat takeover” was arguably more Trevor’s own
project and although he claims to have “learned so much” from the conference, this final paragraph
of the narrative has the most detailed word choices—such as “subsample of the success rate of
the spawn settling”—and narrates a continuity through the last three sentences’ future tense for
Trevor’s work (2017). In other words, the post’s narrative authority strengthens at the moments
when Trevor understands his contribution as part of a collective task. Further support for this
reading comes from the later echo of the verb “help” (2017) with how Trevor’s post transitioned
into talking about participating in the oyster restoration project to begin with.
By way of contrast, a different post related to the program titled “Spotlight on UNH’s Dr. David
Burdick” (Alger 2018) does not present a narrative by Burdick but relates a short interview between
him and a later intern, Mary Kate Alger. It opens,
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Dr. David Burdick plays a big role in [Coastal Research Volunteers]’s efforts to restore sand
dune habitat in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but this work is just a part of Dr. Burdick’s
extensive research on tidal wetlands. In this interview we’ll learn more about his involvement in
dune restoration and get a more in-depth look into some of his other work. (2018)
This initial imbalance between his playing “a big role” in the project despite its being “just a part” of
his work is borne out by the interview, which actually says little about Burdick’s “involvement” and
instead mostly plumbs his inspiration for conservation work. In the most CRV-related question,
“How long have you worked with CRV?,” Burdick does answer, “I have worked with the CRV
from their inception. They have helped with planting marshes at restoration sites, worked to restore
dunes and helped assess plants in our sentinel salt marsh sites” (2018). What stands out from this
answer, perhaps especially after a close reading of Trevor’s post, is Burdick’s quick and passively
phrased answer to the main question followed by the unprompted discussion of the volunteers’
work, which is phrased more actively and concretely—and which twice uses “helped.” Another
significant difference is that he maintains an “I” and “They” split; he does not use “We.” There is
a use of the first-person plural possessive “our,” but that “our” seems to refer to the restoration
program, not himself and the volunteers per se. The volunteers are of course a substantial part of
the program, but Burdick seems to maintain a project ownership to which they contribute but only
vaguely share. This is not to suggest that Burdick comes across as egotistical or possessive in the
post overall; when asked about his “most interesting research question” (2018), he credits a team
and is generally more engaging:
Perhaps most interesting is working to understand how human activities impact anchor species
in special habitats like salt marshes and seagrass beds. For example, we build docks out into
the water for our recreational boats, but shading from these docks can lead to loss of eelgrass
habitat. I found it ironic that docks cause seagrass plants to grow taller just before they die-out
under docks. More importantly, my team learned that dock designs allowing more light to reach
the bottom also supported eelgrass beds. Most emotionally rewarding is restoring or creating
these habitats so they will provide benefits to local communities into the future. (2018)
Like Trevor’s post, this answer signals both active interest and closes on a sense of perpetuity, and
the content signals collaboration not only between Burdick and his team but also, more indirectly,
multispecies collaboration of human dock-builders, eelgrass, eelgrass bed inhabitants, and then
wider local communities.
What narrative close reading uncovers across these two posts, then, are at least two divides,
or two intervention points, for the econarratologist to recognize and respond to. The first and
most direct divide across these two posts we might call feelings of contribution, participation,
and agency. Trevor’s narrative reflects feeling like part of something; Burdick’s account suggests
distinct, probably tiered, roles. The second and less obvious divide these posts evince might be
described as divisions of inspirational labor. Trevor’s experience was more novel to him, so it
was deemed worth a storytelling post, and Trevor himself conveys having done work of value. To
Burdick, the same experiences may have felt iterative and barely worth telling, making his “I have
worked with the CRV from their inception” (2018) seem like all that needed saying. When asked to
inspire or motivate readers, Burdick was asked less to tell stories and more to identify charismatic
species. There are many reasons that professional scientists might be more likely to be interviewed
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 18 10-Jun-22 12:51:07 PM

than asked to narrate stories of their experiences, but econarratology would offer a tool for helping
scientists see their own relation to the tasks of community knowledge-gathering more clearly.
Scientists are increasingly being asked to share narratives about their science to members of the
public, and econarratology may have the benefit of offering a venue to practice and become more
aware of those storytelling practices.
There are reasons, institutional and otherwise, why humanists might not feel incentivized to take
on long-term roles as humanists linked to individual projects. Many of them have to do with the
administrative structures and assessment in Brody’s first sense of the humanities. Humanists, too,
are still seldom trained to collaborate in research. But if, as the editors of one recent collection in
the environmental humanities put it, it is still the aspiration of the environmental humanities to
have “relevance across disciplines” (Barry and Welstead 2017: 6), new kinds of research and new
professional paths may need to be innovated.
CRITICAL OVERLAPS: THE CASE OF COASST

Through econarratology as a practice for increasing storytelling in citizen science, narrative
medicine and the medical humanities can spur new environmental humanist collaborations and
conclusions. To suggest that the exchange between these science-facing humanities is not purely
one-sided, I turn now to a different blog from the opposite side of the United States to suggest how
the exploration of citizen science narratives can provide extensions and conversation of interest to
medical humanists. While citizen science projects range massively in subject and scope, it remains
true that many of the topics requiring the scale of citizen science to engage in data collection
implicitly require facing the finiteness of life and the boundedness of the human lifespan’s temporal
dimension—one of the challenges Charon identifies as central to the rise of narrative medicine and
its ethics of encountering illness. Indeed, it is unsurprising that many texts will blur lines between
environmental and medical humanists as interest groups, from Terry Tempest Williams’s memoir
of toxicology, illness, and ecology, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1998); to
Sheri Fink’s harrowing record of imbricated environmental and humanitarian crises, Five Days
at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (2013); to the environmental justice
memoir of Iraqi American pediatric doctor Mona Hanna-Attisha, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story
of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (2018).
Similarities between the approaches can be rooted once again in Charon’s book, which made
the case for “narrative knowledge” so compellingly (2006). “Unlike scientific knowledge or
epidemiological knowledge,” she writes, “which tries to discover things about the natural world
that are universally true or at least appear true to any observer, narrative knowledge enables
one individual to understand particular events befalling another individual not as an instance
of something that is universally true but as a singular and meaningful situation” (2006: 9). This
insight resonates remarkably with a point made by the ecocritic Laura Dassow Walls in an essay
published very shortly thereafter, where she refutes C. P. Snow’s reduction of the arts to a medium
of translation for other forms of knowledge. Writing about literature generally and not only
narrative, Walls claims, “As a site on which a particular experience is played out, literature cannot
be reduced or abstracted without destroying the intricate interrelationships that make it literature—
interrelationships between words, histories, writer, and reader, for starters” (2007: 203). Reductions
and summaries, she continues, are possible, but not substitutes:
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The contrast, in brief, is this: the knowledge of science is distilled, abstracted, reduced, in order to
be highly mobile, to travel from the laboratory or field to the wider society, across continents and
centuries, the way a mathematical formula can be abstracted and applied anywhere, infinitely.
By contrast, the knowledge of literature cannot be mobilized; it is inseparable from experience,
dependent on direct participation. (2007: 203)
Such tensions between individual experience and traveling knowledge could be found in any of the
books mentioned above, but turning to the COASST blog helps to see how narratives about citizen
science can bring out the information from the field and “direct participation” Walls mentions.
The Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) has been operating for nineteen
years, training volunteers to conduct surveys of beaches across much of the length of the continental
US Pacific Coast from Alaska to California. Volunteers locate and catalog both dead seabirds and
waste debris to establish ecological baselines and assess ecological conditions across the region.
Partly because it is so well established, its website is an appealing and engaging place to learn about
the program’s activity. Like the UNH’s CRV program, the site shares posts about participants, but,
unlike UNH, COASST has a staff member, Eric Wagner, who has authored all eight of the profiles
published as part of the larger blog since 2018. As such, these posts are less clearly the narratives
of the participants themselves, but their common authorship does allow for the quoted words of
participants to stand out all the more. No doubt because the blog entries are all single-authored
by an agent with an interest in publicizing the success and value of the project, the overwhelming
common theme across the stories of participants’ joining and continued engagement with COASST
is the desire to be part of a large effort that exceeds the scope and capabilities of any individual.
Particularly since the volunteers featured on the blog recognize and celebrate their potential to serve as
public ambassadors of the scientific knowledge collected and generated by the project, medical humanists
broadly and maybe narrative medicine researchers more specifically may be interested to see how issues
related to ones they’re familiar with get worked out in an adjacent context. For example, Charon observes
as one of her four important divides that doctors and patients relate to mortality differently, because
“doctors may look upon death as a technical defeat, whereas patients may see death as both unthinkable
and inevitable” (Charon 2006: 22). The way COASST’s blog entries approach death while asserting the
meaningfulness of time spent doing the work by volunteers offers a view at a slant for medical humanists
on the questions of understanding illness and death across the patient-doctor divide. That is, projects
like COASST are at once a safer space for such questions—insomuch as the deaths of birds and other
animal life are often easier for humans to face and reconcile than human death—but are also potentially
more overwhelming to the extent that environmental challenges raise the specter of species death for
the human species as commonly understood. As science-facing humanities fields, the environmental and
medical humanities stand to learn from their respective approaches to these related questions.
COASST citizen scientists survey dead birds; it’s an unusual hobby. In explaining its appeal,
many of the entries, in either the volunteers’ words or Wagner’s, explain volunteers’ ability to
engage in this task by drawing on previous education or professional experience:
“Both of us having done so much science, we were used to dissecting frogs and worms,” Paul
says. “The dead body thing doesn’t bother us too much.” (Wagner 2018f)
[Jeanne] also spent hours in a cadaver lab, so, as she says, “even if I hadn’t done the dead bird
thing before, I had done the dead body thing.” (Wagner 2018d)
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“Being a nurse, I’ve been around death before,” Charlene says. (Wagner 2018b)
“In junior high school I dissected a frog, and that’s about it as far as biology training goes,” he
[Mark] says. “But crime scene training, I’ve had a lot of that over the years, just doing search
warrants and things like that.” (Wagner 2018e)
Any seabird biologist will tell you—even those outside of COASST—that dead birds are part of
the trade, but Williams has taken that maxim to a certain extreme. (Wagner 2019)
In fact, most of the volunteers seem to join the program with some in-built scientific interest
and literacy. Perhaps as a result, volunteers seem to develop, even if they don’t have it at first, an
ability to treat the bird deaths as the result of scientific forces rather than mourning each one—
which several acknowledge is a strange outcome: ‘ “At first dealing with the dead birds made me
kind of sad, but now not so much,’ Mallory says. ‘You know it’s coming, so you kind of get
used to it” ’ (Wagner 2018a). Narrative theory since Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980)
has attended to temporal relationships including iterative phenomena and their impact on sense
making. It’s notable that a goal of the citizen science program would be to construct iterative science
literacy encounters, but how and when narratives of the iterative construct the meaning of death
in particular as emotionally distant (which is likely necessary in some measure for volunteers) is
something econarratologists could observe and that medical humanists might compare to patterns
in the training of narrative medicine.
This is no less the case because the narratives of citizen science in the COASST blog routinely
reflect on participation as time well spent, often on the grounds of increasing scientific knowledge
or aiding in science communication:
“I like that we’re keeping our finger on the pulse of real research,” Paul says. “It feels good to
contribute to the data that researchers are actually using.” (Wagner 2018f)
“One of the things I don’t think the lay public understands is how important a baseline is,” she
says. COASST gives her a chance to explain that importance. (Wagner 2018c)
“It’s nice to know you’re helping to solve a problem.” (Wagner 2018a)
“It’s critical,” Charlene says, “to use citizen science not just to gather data, but also to reach a
larger audience.” (Wagner 2018b)
Miranda likes that he is adding a small piece to a potentially enormous puzzle, and he knows
from experience how small puzzle pieces can be the key to the whole thing. (Wagner 2018e)
Language across these posts like “feels good,” “It’s nice to know,” and “It’s critical” (Wagner
2018f,a,c) all suggest emotional dimensions that come into play when positioning citizen scientists
relative to their projects and the act of data collection, which is valued not simply by the amount of
data produced but by routes that extend into the personal and are expressed and therefore knowable
in narrative telling. In just a couple of the entries, this valuation of time has an implied relationship
to the volunteers’ own age and implicit mortality—notably Diane and Dave Bilderback’s entry
mentions an intent to “pass along” an “ethic of attention” (Wagner 2018c) cultivated across their
collective observations. How medical patients come to see time differently as a result of increased
science literacy they gain from their medical encounters—and/or how the proximity of one’s own
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 21 10-Jun-22 12:51:07 PM

mortality thwarts such reflections that are invited in citizen science projects—may be an area for
growth in narrative medicine, as doctors work to not only address problems but also encourage
patients to narrate futures for their health.
Ultimately, what the environmental humanities may offer most helpfully to the medical
humanities is simply an interested travel companion of sorts. Although their subjects of study differ
in important ways, some of the challenges are still similar enough to make for comparing narrative
strategies and stances toward scientific knowledge in the fields they face. The Bilderbacks’ profile,
for example, features a narrative progression that diminishes the participants being profiled. Unlike
other posts, it begins with the location, notes its proximity to where the couple lives, and only then
narrates their introduction to the program; after that, the post essentially returns to the beach at
Bandon as its focal point, interwoven with comments by Diane about their involvement, before
ending with her observation that “you can see the cycles, you really understand what the beach
goes through” (Wagner 2018c). The choice to narrate a place that will outlast its volunteers and
then close on the idea of the cycles of the place that extend beyond their lifespan essentially folds
the mortality of the participants into a longer scientific arc and creates a continuity out of finitude.
The tendency of the COASST blog posts to value scientific data production while grounding that
value in individual experiences raises a bifurcation in the blog’s communication, because while the
numbers of dead birds are extractable, as Charon and Walls mentioned, the standout features of the
blog entries is the opposite, highlighting the wonderfully particular experiences of the volunteers.
This irony has not been lost on the researchers involved in COASST, who captured it differently in
an article that found one of the effects of the project to be a place attachment whereby the beaches
surveyed became not just assigned square footage of coastal space for volunteers but “their” beaches.
Analyzing the responses of volunteers, He et al. find that “dominant motivations to participate
appear to be situation or context oriented,” and that “participants clearly understand their role as
having both scientific and social aspects” (2019: 33); such findings result from logistically elaborate
projects by scientists seeking to better understand their volunteers, but they are more readily
accessible to the close reader of individual and aggregated narratives. As such, an econarratology of
citizen science resembles narrative medicine in the possibilities for exploring the kinds of narrative
knowledge gathered in scientific contexts but attuned to the lives of people as something more than
abstractable scientific data. That resemblance presents possibilities for codeveloping further tools
and methods.
CONCLUSION
The medical humanities convene a space where scholarly exploration of concepts can permeate
and be permeated by practical contexts. Econarratology fits well within this space because both
ecocriticism and narrative theory have histories of putting the practical and the scholarly in dialogue.
Ecocritical citations to this effect commonly include Glen Love’s Practical Ecocriticism (2003) but
may also include Scott Slovic’s Going Away to Think (2008), which in its first chapter memorably
features Slovic as the ecocritic who becomes a triangulating point between a nest of robins and
a poster-sized etching of William Blake’s (2008: 2), thus holding and attending to practical and
intellectual concerns. Narrative theory, meanwhile, has been part of narrative “turns” in various
fields (Kreiswirth 2008), including the study of law. Even though the core thinkers of narratology
may be thought of as concerned with abstract theoretical models, a narratologist with no less stature
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than Mieke Bal has written, in an essay titled “The Point of Narratology” (1990), that narratology
is and must be practically engaged. As she puts it, “narrative entertains—displays and hides—a
special relationship between people—individuals socially embedded and working collectively—and
their language: a relation of representation,” a hypothesis she follows up with scientists as her
examples (1990: 738). For her part, Erin James has stated from the outset that econarratology
weaves together these intellectual lineages, and thus a practical orientation is traceable in her own
Storyworld Accord, with the political project embedded in her use of “accord” (2015).
If work in this area were to move forward, it would be most productive to work with narratives
written by participants more regularly and more intentionally, rather than blogs. Therefore,
econarratologists doing this work would benefit from reviewing the research on parallel charting by
Charon and others and establishing relationships with citizen science projects. “Parallel” charting
(2006) refers to a record Charon asks residents to create that exists separately from but alongside
the standardized practice of medical charting, and it requires the students to write entries “indexed
for a particular patient,” meaning it remembers the specific personhood of the patient rather than
depersonalizing their symptoms into an abstraction. Charon calls this practice “narrative writing
in the service of the care of particular patient” (2006: 157). Importantly, she distinguishes parallel
charting from free-floating diaristic practice and insists that the chart record impressions from
the encounter of medical practitioner and patient. As she writes, “the goals are to enable them
to recognize more fully what their patients endure and to examine explicitly their own journeys
through medicine” (2006: 156). Crucially, the students read these charts in small groups, where
the skills of literary close reading are then brought to bear on their telling. In her examples, details
visible to a close reader—such as pronoun shifts, verb tense inconsistencies, or resonant word
choices—draw out elements of her residents’ personalities and various facets of care. It is imaginable
that econarratologists could run similar groups with citizen science volunteers and lead scientists,
both of whom are facing these scientific problems at different levels.
Admittedly, citizen science projects already involve a lot of work. Finding and incorporating
humanists into projects and grant applications may present real pragmatic barriers to incorporating
econarratology. But it is because—not in spite of—this workload that collecting narratives from
volunteers and professional scientists involved in citizen science may be crucial. If the narratives
remain uncollected and unexamined, significant portions of the projects stand to be forgotten and
unavailable to learn from. For one thing, the work of econarratology I have suggested here involves
valuable reflection that may appeal to funders and other project stakeholders. And because science is
at its core attentive, observational work, the training of attention and more self-aware relationships
to knowledge that parallel charting and conversation involve could augment the quality of the data-
gathering itself, making citizen econarratology more literally a part of and not apart from the core
goals of the projects themselves.
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27
CHAPTER THREE
Black Lives Matter in Flint,

Michigan: Narrative Medicine
and Ecocriticism in Goliath and
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9
MITA BANERJEE
One of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century, cultural theorist Hans-Ulrich
Gumbrecht has predicted, will be the struggle for natural resources. Among these resources, the
fight for clean, uncontaminated water may come to be the most acute. Gumbrecht writes,
Recently, my eldest son … spoke with remarkable professional matter-of-factness of a world
war for resources. I would certainly escape it, and he possibly would, too. But his daughter—my
granddaughter Clara—would not. The last part of what he said affected me profoundly—“it hit
close to home,” as one says, and in a more profound way than the abstractions of philosophical
ethics ever could. All the same—apart from a somewhat vague “general experience”—it is not
entirely clear why the life and potential suffering of my granddaughter gripped me in such a
singularly intense way. (2014: 79)
Water occupies a central position as a scarce environmental resource over which the “global war”
for resources, to use Gumbrecht’s phrase, is being fought. The United Nations acknowledged in
2010 that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights and
established the UN Resolution 64/292, which held that
the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and
sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the
realisation of all human rights. The Resolution calls upon States and international organisations
to provide financial resources, help capacity-building and technology transfer to help countries,
in particular developing countries, to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking
water and sanitation for all. (“International Decade for Action” 2014)
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The declaration was part of a “decade for action,” centered on “water for life” from 2005 to 2015.
As part of this initiative, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights argued that the
right to clean water was essentially a human rights issue:
The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite
for the realization of other human rights. Comment No. 15 also defined the right to water as the
right of everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable and physically accessible and affordable water for
personal and domestic uses. (“International Decade for Action” 2014)
It may be no coincidence, then, that Gumbrecht speaks of an impending “war” for natural resources
in the same year that the United Nations passes its resolution about water as fundamental for human
dignity. Both Gumbrecht’s cultural diagnosis, or rather, his prognosis, and the UN declaration on
“water for life” emerged in 2010. What is common to both these scenarios—Gumbrecht’s cultural
prediction and the new UN guideline—is a denaturalizing of water both as a resource and as a
human right. Where, previously, the fact that water is one of the central building blocks of all
human and nonhuman life may simply have been taken for granted, water has now become newly
visible. The United Nations sees a need to establish a new guideline only once a given human
right—here, the right of access to clean and uncontaminated water—has ceased to be “natural.”
Not incidentally, water studies may come to be one of the key disciplines of the new millennium. In
the second decade of the twenty-first century, water research has come to the forefront of research
in the life sciences as scientists search for new methodologies: scientists are looking for ways to
make industrial production more sustainable; the same is true for studies in agricultural science
(Markland et al. 2018). Conversely, water research is also increasingly being addressed in the cultural
and social sciences, which assess and interrogate the relationship between water and social justice
issues. How do we make sure, these studies ask, that the right to clean water is granted to all social
groups, regardless of their income, ethnicity, or social status? In these considerations, medicine
may come to play a major part. Since medicine is not only a scientific, but also a social practice,
it is key to linking scientific analysis—such as the bacteriological investigation of water quality—
to social concerns. It is hence essential to explore what may be termed the culture of medicine
(Quevedo 2008): social determinants such as poverty, debt, unemployment, and socioeconomic
and educational status may affect the degree to which certain communities have access to medical
care. Moreover, these factors may render some communities more prone to disease. This is also
true of health risks caused by environmental hazards or lack of resources.
Thus, contaminated water, an indicator of racially biased policies of environmental protection
(Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002: 4), may be found in working-class or immigrant neighborhoods
to an extent that is disproportionate when compared with white, middle-class neighborhoods.
Water, this chapter sets out to illustrate, is at the core of what Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha
Rangarajan, and Vidya Sareswaran have called a “medical-ecological framework.” In this context,
it is important to consider the role of supranational institutions in guaranteeing the health and
well-being of all citizens. It is significant in this context that the declaration of the right of access
to clean water as a human right was issued by the United Nations. The aim of the United Nations
is to ensure the global “protection of human rights and social development” (“Vision Statement”)
As the “water for life initiative” indicates, there is a direct link between the protection of human
rights, on the one hand, and medical rights, on the other. This suggests that the actions taken by
the United Nations, as a global organization, complement measures taken by the World Health
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BLACK LIVES MATTER IN FLINT, MICHIGAN 29
Organization, which is specifically concerned with the protection of global health. Moreover, as the
UN initiative “water for life” indicates, there is a connection between law and medicine, between
human rights and medical justice. The right to health and well-being thus has to be safeguarded
by particular legal measures. However, it is important to note that the United Nations can only
recommend legislation that can then be adopted by national governments. These recommendations
are not legally binding.
In this context, it may be fruitful to explore the role of cultural texts in creating an awareness
of the recommendations issued by the United Nations. Cultural documents such as films, novels,
autobiographies, and blogs, to name only a few, can convey a vivid image of the consequences of
environmental hazards and the resulting health disparities. By raising public awareness about these
concerns, cultural texts can contribute to creating a social climate that can in turn ultimately give
rise to new legislative measures. As Ian Haney López (1996) has suggested, there is a double bind
between the legal and the social spheres.
In the paragraphs that follow, I would like to map the role of water and its relevance for a
“medical-ecological” framework onto a cultural context. I seek to explore the juncture when water
emerges as a topos in literature and in popular culture. I will then link the idea of water rights
to the methodology of narrative medicine. In this context, the introduction of environmental
humanities to narrative medicine may serve to fill a lacuna. Given its specific location in a medical
setting, narrative medicine must necessarily be concerned with the present. It sets out to “hono[r]
the stories of illness” (Charon 2006: ix) that patients tell to their physicians. Its aim is to heed
the patient narrative in all its personal complexity. As Rita Charon writes, “from a confluence
of narrative studies and clinical practices, we have developed an increasingly nuanced view of
the workings of the narrative, relational, and reflexive processes of healthcare” (Charon et al.
2016: 1). If narrative medicine is concerned with the present, however, environmental or ecological
humanities are centrally concerned with the future. In this chapter, I argue that a medical ecological
framework may be key in enhancing the temporality of narrative medicine. Arguably, narrative
medicine sets in only once illness begins. As a methodology for enhancing the clinical practice of
medicine, narrative medicine is necessarily reactive; its temporality is that of the present. It is in
the sense of such temporality that this chapter proposes that narrative medicine can fruitfully be
combined with ecocriticism. Ecocritical narratives, arguably, have a seismographic function: they
can predict or warn against health hazards long before they may actually manifest themselves
materially. In this vein, ecocriticism has recently zoomed in on conceptualizations of water in the
social imagination, such as “water imagery and narrative” (Slovic 2017: 13; Rangarajan and Varma
2018). In these instances, water is understood both as a resource for human life and, in the case
of polluted water, a health risk. The temporality of ecocriticism can hence comprise not only
the present and the past but also the future. If narrative medicine “honors the stories of illness”
in the present (Charon 2006: ix), ecocriticism looks at the stories of peoples’ lives before they
actually become patients. In fact, such future-oriented ecocriticism, by drawing attention to toxic
environments, wants to prevent these life stories from ever becoming narratives of illness. The
convergence between narrative medicine and ecocriticism in a “medical-ecological” framework
proposed by Slovic, Rangarajan, and Sarveswaran hence seems not only timely but highly necessary
as well.
Moreover, a medical-ecological model may be the key for future developments in narrative
medicine for more reasons than one. Given its focus on clinical medicine, narrative medicine has
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understandably been concerned with the role of the individual. The patient is the author of her
own illness narrative. Narrative medicine is at its most powerful where it asks us to understand
this patient narrative in all its cultural complexity and personal detail. Charon “traces the origins
and conceptual foundations of what came in the 1920s to be called close reading, that form of
reading in which every word counts, in which no textual feature is squandered for its contribution
to the meaning of the words” (Charon et al. 2016: 8). However, what may be receding from view
in this context is the relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the
social environment that an individual is immersed in. How would our perspective change if we
looked at how the patient narrative is embedded in the collective experience, especially experiences
stemming from trauma, racism, and other forms of social inequity? In this vein, this chapter will
try to address a more recent development in narrative medicine: the intersection between narrative
medicine and social justice studies. As Charon writes in the introduction to The Principles and
Practice of Narrative Medicine (2016), narrative medicine “emerged to challenge a reductionist,
fragmented medicine that holds little regard for the singular aspects of a patient’s life and to protest
social injustice of a global healthcare system that countenances tremendous health disparities and
discriminatory policies and practices” (Charon et al. 2016: 1).
As Charon’s description indicates, narrative medicine has originally been developed as a clinical
practice: a way of training medical practitioners to listen closely to patients’ stories. The question
that the present chapter wants to ask, however, is the following: what narrative can medicine bring
not only to the medical classroom but also to the analysis of literary and cultural texts? In other
words, if narrative medicine emerged as a methodology that brings the tools of literary analysis
to the practice of clinical medicine, I want to ask the obverse question (Banerjee 2018): how can
narrative medicine be “reimported” into the literature classroom? How can it sharpen our focus
on forms of embodiment in literary texts, and the material dimension of illness and social justice
violations?
In this chapter, I will investigate potential connections between narrative medicine, on the one
hand, and social justice concerns, on the other. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze two very
different texts about environmental destruction and its impact on individuals and collectives: the
TV series Goliath and the documentary film Fahrenheit 11/9 by Michael Moore. I will investigate
the role of narrative medicine in reading these representations as patient narratives.
This chapter tries to demonstrate that narrative medicine can be brought to the analysis of
literary or filmic texts by highlighting patient narratives at the core of these representations. It is
important to note here, however, that these individual narratives may not at first glance appear
to be patient narratives; they may be revealed as such only if we employ the methodology of
narrative medicine as an alternative tool for close reading. In applying narrative medicine to the
analysis of filmic representation, I will explore the relationship between water, social justice, and
health disparity. In my search for this intersection, I will first turn to a filmic narrative that may
at first seem an unlikely candidate for the practice of narrative medicine: the science fiction series
Goliath.
In this context, it may be interesting to note that within narrative medicine, there has been
a debate on which texts and genres work best in a narrative medicine classroom. Crucially,
Danielle Spencer and Maura Spiegel have drawn attention to the fact that literary texts may be
more powerful than other texts—such as nonfiction and/or popular literature—in bringing about a
change of perspective and a heightened sense of empathy. Spencer and Spiegel write,
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We explore the clinical applications of literary knowledge. A recent study published in Science
found that subjects performed better on tests measuring theory of mind, social perception,
and emotional intelligence after reading literary fiction. Notably, those who read nonfiction or
popular fiction did not perform as well. (2016: 16)
However, the present chapter is not concerned with the use of literature in the medical classroom
but, rather, seeks to elicit ways in which narrative medicine as a practice of reading can fruitfully
contribute to literary and cultural analysis. I suggest that even as there may be a significant difference
in the narrative complexity of texts from popular culture as compared to literary representations,
the reading of both genres may benefit from an intervention by narrative medicine. This may be
particularly relevant when it comes to issues of social justice at the intersection of health hazards
and environmental destruction. Filmic representations can raise pertinent questions of who is
recognized as a patient and victim of environmental hazards. These questions are important because
they orient the viewer toward identifying with certain forms of suffering and alternatively lead the
viewer away from certain other forms of suffering that remain obscured in cultural spaces. In the
next section of this chapter, I will argue that an episode of the science fiction series Goliath can
be read as a patient narrative; however, the episode does not ultimately relate issues of illness and
environmental hazard to questions of social disparity.
GOLIATH : THE THRILL OF DRILLING FOR WATER

The first episode of the third season of the science fiction series Goliath, released on Amazon
Prime in 2016, is set in a dystopian future. The episode titled “The Subsidence Adventure” opens
with the portrayal of a middle-aged couple peacefully asleep in their middle-class home. Their day
has been uneventful, except for the uncanny appearance of a large raven, potentially the harbinger
of a dismal future. In the middle of the night, the couple’s dog begins to growl and soon heads out
the front door. The woman wakes up to find out what had caused the dog alarm and follows it into
the open field ahead of her into the family-owned vineyard in order to investigate when the ground
suddenly gives way and swallows her up. The scenario that follows is dystopian and throws light
on the plummeting water resources in the area as a result of unethical water extractivist practices.
The couple lives in California’s Central Valley, an environment that is devoid of water. The man-
made drought is the direct result of giant water companies that ferociously drill for water in
the manner in which companies used to drill for oil in former times. As a result, water has now
become a commodity in the hands of only a select few. The filmic narrative portrays a David and
Goliath battle between the widower, Gene, and the megalithic company. Gene hires the lawyer
Billy McBride in order to redress the blatant injustice of civilians being killed by corporate greed:
GENE: The fall broke her neck. Dog survived. Stayed with her right to the end.
BILLY MCBRIDE: I’m real sorry about this, Gene. She was a hell of a girl.
GENE: Yeah, well. She thought the world of you, too. Always said you were the best.
BILLY MCBRIDE: She would have been a hell of a lot better than me if she had gone into practice.
GENE: Look I’m glad you reconsidered this case. And I’m sure Bobby would as well.
These neighbors of mine, they drill all around here, sucking up the water right
and left, which makes the ground unstable. Now, someone has to be responsible.
My wife is dead. (Goliath 2016)
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A number of factors are significant here. First, it is important to note that water and the access to
water have ceased to be a human right. Water is now only in the hands of a privileged few; it has
become the monopoly of the water company rather than being publicly available to the citizenry as
a whole. Second, however, it is equally significant to consider the affect that the episode evokes as a
reaction to economic injustice. At the core of Goliath, there is an implied outrage against corporate
greed and an empathy for the victims who have to pay for this greed with their own health and
even sometimes their own lives.
The question that I would like to ask in this chapter, however, begins with a fundamental distrust
of Goliath’s central premise. What if, I would like to inquire, the struggle for water were not a
matter of science fiction but of everyday life? What if for some communities in the contemporary
United States, the fight over the right of access to clean, uncontaminated water were part of a
dystopia of the present? As Joni Adamson has noted, “60 percent of African American and Latino
communities and over 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in areas
with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites” (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002: 4). Adamson’s
work on the intersection between environmentalism and social justice is significant for a number of
reasons. It is especially important in that it draws attention to social and medical inequities within
the United States as a nation-state. Adamson emphasizes that the right to access uncontaminated
water varies widely among different communities within the United States and that the disastrous
effects of toxic waste have disproportionately affected poor communities and communities of color.
What this implies, then, is that the right to health and well-being is unevenly distributed within
one and the same nation-state. Adamson’s work is hence an important supplement to the UN
declaration about the right of access to clean water that is emphatic about the measures to be taken
“in particular [in] developing countries” (“International Decade for Action” 2014). What the Flint
water crisis and the cases described by Adamson make clear, however, is that the problem is by no
means limited to the so-called developing world but is likely to occur in the affluent Global North
countries like the United States. In this context, Adamson, Evans, and Stein refer to the concept of
“environmental racism,” which can be defined as
racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulation and
laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, [and] the
official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities.
(2002: 4)
In Goliath, however, this scenario has been turned on its head. First and foremost, Goliath argues
that this struggle for water is set in the future, not in the present. Second, the victims of this water-
driven greed are a white, middle-class couple. This focus, I would like to suggest, has profound
implications for the series’ portrayal of the link between environmental justice and health disparities.
As Adamson, Evans, and Stein outline, a lack of access to clean water and to living conditions
free from toxins currently affect minority communities in the United States to a disproportionate
extent (2002: 4). While the episode of Goliath does portray the disastrous effect of environmental
destruction and agrarian mismanagement, it does not address questions of social disparity. As I will
elaborate below, the episode has the potential to be read as a patient narrative since it dramatizes
the horrific consequences of an unequal distribution of resources. However, it ultimately falls short
of engaging in social critique because questions of a lack of economic privilege are entirely absent
from the film. Ethnic or poor communities are entirely absent from the filmic narrative.
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What happens, we may want to inquire, through this change in perspective? Arguably, this
shift from ethnic minorities to a white, middle-class mainstream makes the scenario of Goliath
all the more problematic. It implies that a social justice issue becomes a matter of major concern
only once this issue has come to afflict white, middle-class communities. If this can happen to an
affluent couple, the episode suggests, it can happen to anyone. The science fiction element and the
dystopian underpinning of the series could not be more disturbing in this context. We are shocked
at the moral and social injustice of the scarcity of water only once its victims happen to be white
and middle class. What would this imply, however, about those who have no such lobby?
This has profound implications for the question of rights. If access to clean water, as the United
Nations reminds us, is a human right, are we disturbed by the absence of such a right regardless of
who suffers from it? Do we pity some victims more than others? The moral outrage at the heart of
Goliath, I would like to argue, is that it is unthinkable that the dominant culture be deprived of the
right to clean water. What this scenario naturalizes, by implication, is the idea that ethnic minorities
may be cut off from water supplies not as a shocking exception but as a matter of everyday reality.
The scarcity of water as a natural resource becomes shocking, then, only once it has “reached” a
white, middle-class public. It can be argued, then, that the filmic narrative of Goliath falls short of
its actual potential. As I have argued at the beginning of this chapter, cultural texts such as films
or series can help raise awareness about the effects of environmental pollution and environmental
racism. To be sure, Goliath does portray the lives of a middle-aged, white, middle-class couple
affected by environmental destruction. However, it entirely omits to address the question whether
such environmental injustice affects not only affluent white neighborhoods, but also—perhaps to
an even greater extent—poor and ethnic communities.
Even more problematically, the episode turns the question of rights on its head. Whereas in real
life, as Adamson, Evans, and Stein have demonstrated, those who suffer from contaminated water
are disproportionately of ethnic descent, Goliath features Native Americans as employees of the
water company who clearly condone its cutthroat policy. Finally, there is closure to the injustice
narrative that Goliath tells: not only can the middle-class widower afford a good lawyer, but justice
is ultimately restored perhaps not as an actual outcome of the lawsuit but by the viewer’s outrage
at a dystopian scenario that must never translate into reality.
So far, I have been concerned with the issue of environmental destruction in Goliath. I would
now like to consider the potential of reading the episode in the framework of narrative medicine.
At first glance, it may be significant here that the episode is not so much concerned with an
illness on the basis of contaminated water but with a death that results from the sheer absence of
water. The episode, we may argue, revolves not so much about illness than about deaths caused by a
lack of water. The protagonist’s wife is killed by the fact that water has been monopolized through
corporate greed. Goliath may thus be more concerned with issues of environmental destruction
than with stories of illness. What the episode does touch upon, however, is the idea of trauma and
its relationship to social injustice. Gene, the widower, dedicates his life to redressing the wrong that
has been inflicted on him by monopoly capitalism. This trauma is all the more pronounced because
so far, the greed of the companies drilling for water has gone unchecked. Crucially, narrative
medicine has stressed that a “story of illness” can be told either by the patient herself or by her
relatives (Charon 2006). This, it can be proposed, is the potential that the episode of Goliath may
hold in terms of narrative medicine. Gene is ultimately unable to prevent his wife’s death, which is
due to environmental destruction. To be sure, the episode itself does not address issues of race and
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 33 10-Jun-22 12:51:08 PM

class or the fact of racially and socially disenfranchised communities being at a much higher risk of
suffering from environment-related health risks. However, in the image of Gene contemplating his
wife’s unfair death caused by economic greed, these questions are at least hinted at in Goliath, even
as an overt addressing of race and class is absent from the filmic narrative.
It can thus be argued that Goliath’s white, middle-class protagonist verges on patienthood.
Goliath can thus accommodate stories of illness (with regard to the trauma that results from
bereavement) as long as they concern white, middle-class protagonists. This points to a crucial
intersection between narrative, medicine, and cultural representation. One of the most central
questions that we may ask in this context is the following: whose narrative is being represented as
a narrative of suffering and of illness? Cultural texts can elicit empathy by making the reader or
viewer witness stories of illness. This is key when it comes to questions of social representations.
Whom do we empathize with in Goliath? As I have suggested above, questions of race and class
are absent from this episode of the science fiction series. In the fictional scenario envisioned by
the series, Goliath zooms in on a white, middle-class couple that bears the burden of corporate
capitalism. There are two alternative interpretations for this form of representation. One way of
analyzing Goliath would hold that the white, affluent couple functions as a stand-in or surrogate
for all individuals and communities affected by environmental injustice. From this perspective,
both the couple’s ethnicity and their social status would be irrelevant. Only their role as victims of
environmental destruction would be important. This reading would lend itself to an analysis of the
episode based on a particular form of narrative medicine. Such an interpretation would zoom in on
the loss of the wife’s life and the trauma experienced by her husband. This reading of the episode
would be diametrically opposed to the other interpretation of Goliath. This second perspective
would draw the politics of surrogacy into doubt. It would argue that the episode effaces from view
the connection between issues of social and economic disparity, on the one hand, and the health
risks entailed by environmental destruction, on the other. I will now turn both to Michael Moore’s
film Fahrenheit 11/9 and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to investigate how the questions asked
by narrative medicine can be fruitfully combined with concerns of racial and social injustice.
BLACK LIVES IN FLINT: MOORE’S FAHRENHEIT 11/9

The question asked by Moore’s recent documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 stands in direct contrast to
Goliath’s disturbing science fiction scenario. What if for some US citizens, Moore inquires, the
world that Goliath portrays as a scenario of the future were not science fiction? What if this
struggle for water was real, and a struggle of the present? Seen from this perspective, Goliath’s main
message may actually seem cynical. It is in this context that I would like to superimpose Goliath’s
dystopian outlook on the real-life dystopia of Flint, Michigan. Like Goliath, if with completely
inverse signification, Fahrenheit 11/9 begins as a narrative of economic interest. Governor Snyder,
a character in the film, devises a plan to fuel the economy of Flint, a town that is predominantly
African American and poor white. As a tribute to the companies who have invested into his election
campaign, he proposes to build new water pipes. However, this involves switching the water supply
from Lake Huron to the Flint River:
[A photo of Governor Rick Snyder giving a speech in front of the US flag is shown. Moore’s
voice-over begins.]
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Moore: Governor Synder wanted to flex his new autocratic powers. He saw an opportunity
to take advantage of the poor city and the country. And … [a map of the Great Lakes
is shown] … of the largest source of fresh water in the world. [Another photo of
Snyder at a speech is shown.] Option A was that he could just leave well enough
alone. After all, for five decades the city of Flint got its water from Lake Huron. [A
video shot of Lake Huron’s scenery and clear water is shown.] A ten-thousand-year-
old pure glacier lake—water delivered to Flint through publicly owned pipelines. Or
… [we see another picture of Snyder] … there was option B: Why not build a new,
completely unnecessary pipeline that would benefit investors, his major campaign
donors, and banks, like Wells Fargo. The only catch was that while the new pipeline
was being built, Flint would have to switch over from Lake Huron …
[Video shots of Flint river’s dirty water full of litter and debris are displayed.]
Moore: … to the industrial sewage ditch known as Flint river. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018)
What emerges in this context is a dismal intersection between environmental and medical narratives.
The damage done to the health of Flint’s inhabitants, the film describes, is both immediate and long-
term. Due to the switching of water supplies, Flint’s population suffered a massive lead poisoning,
a disaster that especially affected the children (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018):
[Video recording of Snyder and his team toasting and drinking Flint water.]
All: Here’s to Flint!

Moore [as a voice-over]: Here is his team toasting each other over what would amount to, in
essence, a slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
[Cut to a WNEM news recording.]
Reporter: Some residents are wondering: Will we see a change?
[WNEM cuts to press conference recording.]
Daugherty Johnson
[Utilities administrator]: No, average residents won’t notice any of this.
[The clip cuts to a private recording of someone filling their bucket with the new
Flint water. It’s orange. Moore’s voice-over continues.]
Moore: Within days, the average residents noticed the difference.
[Another private recording of Flint’s orange water filling a bathtub is played.]
Moore: A big difference.
Child [from off-camera in the recording]: That’s nasty.
[The camera cuts to a young African American girl drinking a glass of water, followed
by a picture collage of people experiencing the symptoms Moore lists, mainly
featuring small African American children.]
Moore: Their hair started to fall out, skin rashes appeared all over their bodies, and the
children got sick. [The camera shows a young white father with this infant son,
followed by video shots of Hurley Medical Center.]
Moore: Parents, whose children showed no symptoms, were still worried that they might be
sick, because as one doctor noticed, …
[A photo of Mona Hanna-Attisha treating an African American infant is displayed.]
Moore: … nearly every child had ingested lead. (Fahrenheit 11/9 2018)
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A number of aspects are significant about this passage. First and foremost, it is the color of the water
coming out of residents’ taps that is significant here. The drinking water that now fills children’s
cups happens to be orange. In this context, it is significant to mention that the UN declaration
about water as a human right specifies a number of factors that this right involves. Interestingly
enough, color is one of these features specifically singled out by the declaration as being key to the
link between water and human dignity. As the UN website suggests, the quality of water should
be “Acceptable. Water should be of an acceptable colour, odour and taste for each personal or
domestic use” (“International Decade for Action” 2014).
It is important to note that this scene at first appears as an uncanny echo of Goliath: corporate
greed has endangered the lives of innocent citizens, who have been caught unaware by the company’s
schemes. Yet, unlike the depiction in Goliath, this water stunt, and the damage to human health
that is accepted as collateral damage, does not lead to moral outrage and public dismay. Unlike the
white, middle-class couple in Goliath’s fictional suburbia, the citizens of Flint are unable to afford
good lawyers, and their cry for help goes unheard. Their lawyer, however, eventually turns out to
be the town’s pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. It was she who recognizes the damage that
has been done to Flint’s children. As a doctor, she is able to diagnose this damage both in terms of
its immediate and future effects.
It is here that Moore’s film about the real-life dystopia of Flint, Michigan, resonates with the
idea of narrative medicine. What would happen if narrative medicine is woven into a reading of the
event in Flint? Observed from this perspective, Moore’s documentary can be interpreted as a story
of illness. Yet, what is central to this story is that it is not so much a story of present illness but of
a future lack of well-being. What is so devastating about the event in Flint is that this is a story of
prospective illness. Moore’s film intervenes into the debate on the Flint water scandal by describing
this catastrophe in a way that corresponds to the vision of narrative medicine. Moreover, the film
can also be said to enhance the temporality at the core of narrative medicine. Fahrenheit 11/9
features narratives of illness not only in the present but also in the future. It is in this concept of a
story of prospective illness that the narrative of Fahrenheit 11/9 and of Hanna-Attisha’s subsequent
book, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Hope and Resistance in an American City (2018),
become all the more powerful. They link environmental injustice with social injustice, and they
ask a question that is also at the heart of Goliath about whether white middle-class citizens would
be subjected to such a blatant disregard of human rights. At the core of Moore’s documentary and
Hanna-Attisha’s book is the intersection of the medical and the social. As Hanna-Attisha writes, the
Flint water crisis was about much more than water:
The crisis manifested itself in water—and in the bodies of the most vulnerable among us, children
who drank that water and ate meals cooked with that water, and babies who guzzled bottles of
formula mixed with that water. … But this is also a story about the deeper crises we’re facing
right now in our country: a breakdown in democracy; the disintegration of critical infrastructure
due to inequality and austerity; environmental injustice that disproportionately affects the poor
and black; the abandonment of civic responsibility and our deep obligations as human beings to
care and provide for one another. (2018: 13)
As patients, and even more crucially, as individuals who, due to lead poisoning, may become
patients in the future, the children’s narratives are being told by a filmmaker and a pediatrician who
speak on their behalf. Here, narrative medicine as a methodology helps elucidate the complexity
9781350197305_pi-408.indd 36 10-Jun-22 12:51:08 PM

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painters in, and get it all put to rights before we flit a single stick; and
after it is all right, we shall remove quite at our leisure. By this plan
we shall not only avoid the risk of breaking things, which is always
the case in a hurried flitting, but we shall get porters and carters a
great deal cheaper, for these fellows, you know, charge three wages
on the actual term-day, when every body is flitting. But if it should
happen, as above mentioned, that you are limited to a few hours, so
that your furniture, as it goes out, will meet the furniture of another
person coming in, and, as it goes in, will meet, in tug of war, that of
another person coming out, then the blessed anticipation of your
future comforts in “that nice house” reconciles you to every thing,
and you make yourself think that, after all, it is better, when one is
flitting, to have it all over in the shortest possible space of time.
Sometimes, even when you have a vantage space, you are
strangely jockeyed out of it before you are aware. Say the house is
to be painted before you go into it. Being quite at your ease, you are
satisfied that the painters are engaged about two months before the
term. You know very well that these men are the greatest of all
rascals; that, indeed, they have no other principle within them but
just to put people to as much trouble as possible. But two months!
that must surely be sufficient. Well, the painters come all this time
before the term, and, like the ancient Spanish navigators, take
possession of a newly-discovered country, mark the job for their
own, by planting a nasty pail in one room, and setting up a brush on
end against the wall in another. You look in about a week after, and
see the pail and the brush in statu quo: the fellows have as yet done
nothing but taken seisin.[3] You think this is not just quite right, and
calling in a cool easy way at the master’s as you go home, express
your wish that the job should be immediately proceeded with, being
anxious to get into the house as long before the term as possible.
The painter is all politeness, and promises to put men upon the
house next morning, so that it will be got ready for your reception in
no time—by which he appears to mean a space of time so brief as
not to be worth defining, but which you eventually find to have
signified that the job would be finished not at all in time. As you come
home to your dinner next afternoon, you take a turn that way to see
how “the men” are getting on. The house is as empty and desolate
as ever; but, from a change in the relative situations of the pail and
the brush, you see that they have been there. On inspecting things
more minutely, you find that one bed-room has been washed down,
and is now, to use a kitchen phrase, swimming. Well, this is a
beginning, you think. “The men” have been doing what they could to-
day, and to-morrow they would be a good way advanced. On this
supposition, you take no more thought about the house for three or
four days more, when, dropping in as before, you have the
satisfaction of seeing that there is another pail, and that the ceiling of
the dining-room has been whitewashed. Still, dilatory as the rascals
evidently are, you hardly think there is a sufficient casus fœderis, or
breach of treaty, to entitle you to go and blow up the polite man at
head-quarters. You suffer for another day; and then, dropping in
again, you find a little Flibbertigibbet of a boy exerting himself with
his tiny arms to whitewash the ceiling of the parlour. Well, my boy,
where are “the men?” This is your question; but for answer you only
learn that there have never been any men in the matter—nobody
has ever been here but Flibbertigibbet himself. You feel, at this
intelligence, almost as much bewildered and obfusculated as George
the Second was when he asked an Irish sergeant at a review after
the seven years’ war, where was the —— regiment? and was
answered, “Please your majesty, I’se the —— regiment;” the
Hibernian being in reality the only man that had survived the last
campaign. Is this the men, you say to yourself, that Mr ——
promised to put upon the house? You go of course instantly, and, Mr
—— being, by his own good fortune, from home, you leave a note
for him, expressed in such terms as you are sure must bring him to
his senses, if any thing will. Dropping in next day to see the effect,
your ire is soothed at finding three men at work besides
Flibbertigibbet, and every thing seems going on so well, that you
trouble them no more for a week. But it is needless to pursue this
painful theme any farther. Suffice it to say, that, having once got
these artists into the house, you feel by and by as if they were never
again to be got out; you fear that, contrary to the catastrophe of the
well-known jest, there will be no letting go the painter. Their pails,
and buckets, and brushes, and all their slopery, are just as rife in the
house a week before the term as they were a month earlier; and still
to every remonstrance Mr —— replies, that all he can do is to put on
more men next Monday morning. It is all you can do, perhaps, to get
the odious varlets trundled out, “pots and all,” on the very day before
you are compelled to remove; so that, instead of having ample scope
and verge enough, as you expected, you find that you will be just as
much hurried and flurried as if you had been going to a house not
previously vacated.
Well, whatever be the foregoing circumstances, flitting day at last
arrives in all its horrors. The lady of the household has for several
days been storing all kinds of small things by into drawers and
boxes, that they might the more safely be transported, so that the
family finds itself already deprived of the half of those things which
are necessary to comfort, and the whole of what minister to luxury.
Your shaving-box is amissing two mornings before flitting day, and
has to be fished up, like a “drowned honour,” from the bottom of
some abyss of well-regarded trifles. When you come home to dinner
on flitting day eve, it is any money for a boot-jack. You take your
meals that evening without table-cloths; and unless you can bring
down your proud stomach to a brown kitchen bowl, any thing like a
comforting drink is out of the question. The crepuscular anguish of
the day is already felt. You go to your bed that night off an
uncarpeted floor, and in the midst of all kinds of tubs covered up with
packsheet, and looking-glasses swaddled up in linen. If you get a
nightcap, you may consider yourself lucky above all mortal men. You
go to bed, but sleep there is none, for you have to rise next morning
long before the usual hour, and the anticipatory sense of what you
have to go through that day fills every nook and cranny of your mind.
You awake to a rush of children and servants on the stairs; and
though you exert every nerve of your memory to recollect the new
geography of things in the room, it is ten to one but you stumble over
some tub or chest in the dark, where you thought no tub should be;
and, upon the whole, the feeling with which you thrust your poor cold
distressed shanks into your vestments, is not much short of that
which must possess a man about to walk to the scaffold. A breakfast
composed of every thing but the proper materials, and taken out of
every thing but the proper vessels, collects such a group of shabby
slatternly figures as you did not before think yourself husband, or
father, or master to. The meal is gulped in agonies of haste, for the
carts were to be at the door at seven exactly, and it is now within a
few minutes of the hour. Well, the carts come; one by one are your
household goods displaced and packed up on those vehicles. Grates
are placed on the breadth of their backs at the bottom, by way of
ballast. Then mattresses go over them, to make an agreeable
flooring for other things. Tables are tumbled a-top, with their legs
reared high in the air, like cart-horses enjoying themselves in their
Sunday pastures; and to the ropes with which the heaps are bound
down, are attached fry-pans, children’s toys, and other light articles,
all by way of garnishing. Though far above such things in general,
you are obliged on this occasion to see after very mean details, lest
your property should suffer some dreadful damage. The more
delicate articles are necessarily entrusted to porters or other
serviceable individuals, who carry them separately to your new
house. “The boys,” glad to escape the school for a day, are
employed, to their great satisfaction, in transporting single things,
“which don’t break;” and the servants see after certain baskets of
crystal and crockery, “which do.” To see all things properly disposed
of—each to the individual best fitted for it—is your business, and no
easy one it is. At length, after every thing is fairly packed off, the lady
and yourself walk away together, the cat following in a pillow-slip
under the charge of your second eldest daughter.
Before three in the afternoon, the whole of your furniture, broken
and whole, has been thrust, higglety-pigglety, into your new house,
where you find all things in the most chaotic state of confusion.
Kitchen things repose in the dining-room; drawing-room chairs are
deposited in the kitchen; and a huge chest of drawers stands in the
vestibule, with a shoulder thrust so far out into the fair way as to
render it almost impossible to pass. The kitchen grate is only to be
built in after six o’clock in the evening, when the masons are
released from their day’s work; so there is no possibility of cooking
any thing. A provisional arrangement is therefore made on this point.
You, and your wife, and your children, and all your assistants,
bivouac in some shabby parlour, and regale yourselves (absit
elegantia) with rolls and porter. Henry, your eldest son, who has
wrought like a Turk all day, leads the feast with his coat off, and the
scene can only be compared to a rough-and-tumbling in the back
woods of America. No ceremony as to knives. Rolls, and even large
loaves, are torn through the middle, and large mouthfuls dug out
from the mass by the thumb or forefinger. The liquor goes round in
some ordinary vessel, never before appropriated to such a purpose,
and all feeling of discomfort being stolen away by the novelty and
strong natural feeling of the occasion, the jest and laugh abound.
Even in the midst of all the disarray, great hopes and expectations
are expressed regarding the new mansion. Such capital high
ceilings! Such a broad elegant lobby! So different from that dismal
hole we have left! Or, if the ceilings are low, and the lobby narrow,
while in the former house they were the reverse, the contrast is
drawn in reference to some other points where superiority is
indisputable, while the demerits of the new abode are cast discreetly
into shade, only to be brought out and complained of at the approach
of next Candlemas. You either have left a good view from the
windows, or you are entering upon one. Suppose your former house,
being in the centre of the town, had hardly any view, then your wife
thus comments upon it:—“Such a dark confined place! Nothing to be
seen from the windows, but the opposite houses, or else the
chimney-stalks and old wives. Now, here we are quite in the country.
The drawing-room commands Fife and North Berwick Law, and even
from the bed-rooms we catch a great lump of the Dalmahoy hills. If
we just step to the end of the house, we are into the fields; and then
we’ll be so very quiet here, compared with what we were. Not a
carriage or a cart passing from morning till night. We’ll get some rest
at last; and truth to tell, my health is in great need of it. How truly
delightful thus to get fairly out of that black, smoky, noisy town, to a
place where we can enjoy all the pleasures of the country, and yet
be within reach of every convenience of the city! And just consider
how much benefit the walk must be to your own health. We formerly
lived so near your place of business, that you got no exercise at all,
seeing that I never could prevail upon you to take a walk on purpose.
But here you must walk, and the good it must do you will be visible in
a week’s time,”—&c. &c. &c. If the case has been totally the reverse,
you are addressed as follows:—“How delightful to get fairly away
from that cold, out-of-the-world, dull place, and once more feel
ourselves snug in the town! We’ve no prospects here from the
windows; but, ’deed, when folk have prospects, I never see that they
make much use of them. For my part, I never looked out of the
drawing-room windows once in the month; for what are the Fife hills
or North Berwick Law after one has once seen them? [What
philosophy we have here!] And then, what good did we get from the
garden? It was just a fash to keep right; and I’m sure, when we had
paid the gardener, we did not make a penny off the vegetables. Now,
here, although there be little prospect from any of the windows, we’re
at least a great deal better protected from the wind. If we have not a
garden of our own, have we not the green market almost at the
door? And such a weary distance you had to walk every day! No
more of that now. Here, when you want a walk, you can take one;
and when you don’t like, you can let it alone. Walks are very well,
perhaps, in good summer weather; but I’ve no idea of seeing you
plash through a long dirty road twice every day through the whole
winter. Whenever we want either a walk or a prospect, we’ll get it in
the Queen Street gardens; for you know Mrs —— has told me that
we may have her key whenever we like. In our old ill-contrived
house, we had no place to put any thing off our hand; not so much
as a cupboard in the whole house; but now, you see, we have as
many presses as rooms, and a capital cellar for coals and lumber.
And how near we are here to all the best shops! If it were for nothing
but the convenience of getting tea-bread at a minute’s warning from
Mr Littlejohn, the baker, whenever any person calls upon us in the
evening, it would have been worth while to remove to this house.
The lass likewise tells me that there is a very obliging woman, quite
at hand, who keeps a mangle for the use of the neighbourhood,
which will be a great convenience to the family; and that she will take
in hand to supply us with milk or cream at any hour of the day,”—&c.
&c. &c. Thus, it will be observed, neither the spirit of discontent nor
the spirit of hope is ever without material for feeding its particular
necessities.
You have now got fairly into your new house, bag and baggage. It
is after the manner, however, of a certain pound of comfits which a
carrier once brought from a city confectioner to a country customer.
The paper bag having proved insufficient in the journey, the contents
had dispersed themselves throughout all the other packages in the
cart. Every parcel, and bag, and box, had to be shaken clear of the
lurking carvy, till, the whole of the bulky articles having been
discharged and laid off, the little white particles were found at the
bottom mingled with straws, fragments of rope, and paper, and all
other kinds of trash. The whole having been swept out, however, the
honest old carrier brought them to the owner in a large platter,
saying, with the air of a man who has relieved his conscience of
some uncommon weight, “Here they are, mistress; ye hae them a’
for me.” Just like the comfits are all your goods and chattels—your
ox, and your ass, and your children, and your every thing else—the
whole are there; but in such a state! Perhaps, to add to your
distresses, you have to delay putting the principal rooms to rights till
the painters have to be with you. This, of course, adjourns the
termination of your agonies sine die. Perhaps, about three months
after, when you have battled the rascals out of one room into
another, much after the manner of the siege of St Sebastian, you get
at last into the enviable attitude “as you were,” resolving of course
never again to remove as long as you live, but still as ready before
next 2d of February to take that step as ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A ceremony in the law of Scotland, by which a man
becomes invested with a piece of land or house property.
FALLACIES OF THE YOUNG.
“DEBTORS AND CREDITORS.”
The common feeling respecting debtors and creditors is very

erroneous, and, as is common with popular fallacies, it imposes with
double force upon the young and inexperienced. Debtors are
represented in all works of fiction, and in the ordinary language of a
large portion of society, as a set of amiable, unfortunate, and most
interesting persons: Creditors, on the other hand, as an unmingled
generation of execrable wretches, with a hardness of heart that
would not disgrace an executioner, and indeed only one remove
from another stony class of men, the much misrepresented jailers.
Now, the person who writes this article has known many debtors and
creditors, and he can say that, in by far the most of cases, the latter
were the better class of men. He alludes, of course, not to
commercial men at large, who are in their own persons, in general,
as much of the one thing as the other, but to cases where the
creditor is a tradesman, and the debtor a customer; that is, where
the debt is not incurred in the intercourse of business, but for the
personal use and benefit of the debtor. In these cases, so far from
the creditor being an unfeeling and relentless tyrant, as he is
generally represented, he is only the indignant victim of the
imprudence or guilt of the debtor. The latter may be an amiable and
interesting person, for we often find these characteristics united to
consummate folly and disregard of the rights of others. But the
young must beware how they set down debtors, in a class, as purely
estimable and entitled to sympathy, while they at the same time look
upon creditors as only ruthless persecutors, worthy of the bitterest
execration. They may depend upon it, that no notion could be more
erroneous, no error more apt to be fatal to them in their course
through life. They must be informed that to incur debt for their own
gratifications, without the ability to discharge it, is just another thing
for selling themselves as slaves to their creditors. After doing so,
they are no longer entirely free: part of themselves becomes the
property of another, and thus they lose the respect of the world,
which cannot see one man indulge in enjoyments at the expense of
his fellow, without thinking of him very meanly. The incurring of debt
for personal gratification is odious, for many reasons. In the first
place, it violates that rule of nature which appoints every man to
work for himself, and only enjoy as he works. It also tends to
occasion the ruin of innocent persons. Creditors are not invariably
rich, as one would suppose them to be, from reading novels. They
are more frequently poor, industrious persons, who, in losing money
by their debtors, are apt to be made debtors themselves, and
thereby ruined. In fact, the case stands generally thus: An idle or
extravagant person procures support for his bad appetites, and is
enabled to show himself off as a very fine fellow, at the expense of a
humble-minded honest trader, who confines himself constantly to his
business, and forbids himself almost every indulgence, in order that
he may be able to pay every one to whom he is indebted, and
discharge all the other duties of a good citizen. Now, if young people
will bring their naturally generous feelings to bear upon this point,
they will see that the debtor, and not the creditor, is alone worthy of
execration. And they may be assured, that, where creditors show a
severity to their debtors, it is generally either merited by the latter, or
is dictated by a justifiable consideration of the danger into which they
are thrown by the non-payment of the money which is their due, and
which they may be owing in their turn to some other person.
In every rule there are exceptions; but it is necessary to guard
against the breaking down of great rules by allowing for trifling
exceptions. Because good men sometimes incur debt, and become
insolvent, through no fault of theirs, we must not infringe upon the
majesty of the great maxim, that debt ought to be paid, and that its
non-payment is an evil. Young people, if they wish to prosper in the
world, will do well not to excuse all contraction of debt for the sake of
the few who contract it innocently. They must have it impressed
forcibly upon their minds, that every pleasure in which they indulge
themselves, without the reasonable prospect of paying for it, though
it be but to the amount of one penny, is a step in error, and apt to be
the beginning of their destruction. They must have it impressed upon
their minds, that no man of good feelings can enjoy the least
comfort, if he be not conscious of working for, or being honestly
come into the possession of, fully as much as he spends. To persist
in living beyond our incomes, is to live a life of dishonesty; and to
subsist on the industry of relatives, as is sometimes the case with
the idle and the dissolute, is worse still, for it involves an excessive
meanness of spirit, ingratitude, and hard-heartedness—thus adding
depth to the crime, and will be sure to be visited some day with
feelings of anguish and remorse.
A predominating error among the junior classes of society, is a
disinclination to wait for a short time till they be enabled to compete
in the enjoyment of luxuries with others they see around them, and
who, it is more than probable, have toiled long and painfully before
they arrived at their present apparently prosperous condition. This
impatience of reaching a certain height in the ladder of fortune,
without taking deliberation to mount a number of preliminary and
difficult steps, cannot, indeed, be sufficiently reprehended, where it
occurs, as it leads to that fatal resource of incurring debts never to
be paid, and that supposed harshness of creditors, which a
disordered process of reasoning brings into view. I would here
tenderly admonish the youthful part of the community to refrain from
indulgences they cannot honestly command. Let them believe one
who has had some experience, when he tells them that there is not
the least chance of the world running away from them; that the
present generation of grown men will not consume all earthly
enjoyments, but will leave a boundless variety of everything which
can please the senses, or gratify an honourable ambition. They
need, therefore, be in no hurry whatever, and take time to build their
fortune on a firm and secure basis. The rising generation cannot lay
these things sufficiently to heart. They cannot be sufficiently taught,
that suffering under the consequences of imprudently-incurred debts
does not necessarily make them heroes—is not entitled to
unmingled sympathy, no more than a robber at the gallows is a
martyr; but that, while pity is perhaps due to them, as to all who err in
this frail world, the larger share of sympathy ought to be bestowed
on their unfortunate victims, the creditors, whose families may be
suffering from their criminal follies, and who are apt to be by far the
better and honester men.
GENERAL INVITATIONS.
“Pray, do call in an easy way some evening, you and Mrs

Balderstone; we are sure to be at home, and shall be most happy to
see you.” Such is the kind of invitation one is apt to get from
considerably intimate acquaintances, who, equally resolved against
the formality and the expense of a particular entertainment on your
account, hope to avoid both evils by making your visit a matter of
accident. If you be a man of some experience, you will know that all
such attempts to make bread and cheese do that which is more
properly the business of a pair of fowls, end in disappointment; and
you will, therefore, take care to wait till the general invitation
becomes a particular one. But there are inexperienced people in this
world who think every thing is as it seems, and are apt to be greatly
deceived regarding this accidental mode of visiting. For the sake of
these last, I shall relate the following adventure:—
I had been remarkably busy one summer, and, consequently,
obliged to refuse all kinds of invitations, general and particular. The
kind wishes of my friends had accumulated upon me somewhat after
the manner of the tunes frozen up in Baron Munchausen’s French
horn; and it seemed as if a whole month would have been necessary
to thaw out and discharge the whole of these obligations. A
beginning, however, is always something; and, accordingly, one
rather splashy evening in November, I can’t tell how it was, but a
desire came simultaneously over myself and Mrs Balderstone—it
seemed to be by sympathy—of stepping out to see Mr and Mrs
Currie, a married pair, who had been considerably more pressing in
their general invitations than any other of our friends. We both knew
that there was a cold duck in the house, besides a bit of cheese just
sent home by Nicholson, and understood to be more than excellent.
But, as the old Scots song says, the tid had come over us, and forth
we must go. No sooner said than done. Five minutes more saw us
leaving our comfortable home, my wife carrying a cap pinned under
her cloak, while to my pocket was consigned her umbrageous comb.
As we paced along, we speculated only on the pleasure which we
should give to our kind friends by thus at last paying them a visit,
when perhaps all hope of our ever doing so was dead within them.
Nor was it possible altogether to omit reflecting, like the dog invited
by his friend to sup, upon the entertainment which lay before us; for
certainly on such an occasion the fatted calf could hardly expect to
be spared.
Full of the satisfaction which we were to give and receive, we were
fully into the house before we thought it necessary to inquire if any
body was at home. The servant girl, surprised by the forward
confidence of our entrée, evidently forgot her duty, and
acknowledged, when she should have denied, the presence of her
master and mistress in the house. We were shown into a dining-
room as clean, cold, and stately as an alabaster cave, and which
had the appearance of being but rarely lighted by the blaze of
hospitality. My first impulse was to relieve my pocket, before sitting
down, of the comb, which I thought was now about being put to its
proper use; but the chill of the room stayed my hand. I observed, at
the same time, that my wife, like the man under the influence of
Eolus in the fable, manifested no symptom of parting with her cloak.
Ere we could communicate our mutual sensations of incipient
disappointment, Mrs Currie entered with a flurried, surprised air, and
made a prodigious effort to give us welcome. But, alas! poor Mr
Currie; he had been seized in the afternoon with a strange vertigo
and sickness, and was now endeavouring, by the advice of Dr Boak,
to get some repose. “It will be such a disappointment to him when he
learns that you were here, for he would have been so happy to see
you. We must just entertain the hope, however, to see you some
other night.” Although the primary idea in our minds at this moment
was unquestionably the desperatio cibi—the utter hopelessness of
supper in this quarter—we betrayed, of course, no feeling but
sympathy in the illness of our unfortunate friend, and a regret for
having called at so inauspicious a moment. Had any unconcerned
person witnessed our protestations, he could have formed no
suspicion that we ever contemplated supper, or were now in the
least disappointed. We felt anxious about nothing but to relieve Mrs
Currie, as soon as possible, of the inconvenience of our visit, more
especially as the chill of the room was now piercing us to the bone.
We therefore retired, under a shower of mutual compliments and
condolences, and “hopes,” and “sorries,” and “have the pleasures;”
the door at last slamming after us with a noise which seemed to say,
“How very glad I am to get quit of you!”
When we got to the street, we certainly did not feel quite so
mortified as the dog already alluded to, seeing that we had not, like
him, been tossed over the window. But, still the reverse of prospect
was so very bitter, that for some time we could hardly believe that
the adventure was real. By this time we had expected to be seated
snug at supper, side by side with two friends, who, we anticipated,
would almost expire with pleasure at seeing us. But here, on the
contrary, we were turned out upon the cold inhospitable street,
without a friend’s face to cheer us. We still recollected that the cold
duck remained as a fortress to fall back upon; but, being now fairly
agog in the adventure, the idea of returning home, re infecta, was
not to be thought of. Supper we must have in some other house than
our own, let it cost what it may. “Well,” said Mrs Balderstone, “there
are the Jacksons! They live not far from this—suppose we drop in
upon them. I’m sure we have had enough of invitations to their
house. The very last time I met Mrs Jackson on the street, she told
me she was never going to ask us again—we had refused so long—
she was going, she said, just to let us come if we liked, and when we
liked.” Off we went, therefore, to try the Jacksons.
On applying at the door of this house, it flew open, as it were, by
enchantment, and the servant girl, so far from hesitating like the
other, seemed to expect no question to be asked on entrée. We
moved into the lobby, and inquired if Mr and Mrs Jackson were at
home, which was answered by the girl with a surprised affirmative.
We now perceived, from the pile of hats and cloaks in the lobby, as
well as a humming noise from one of the rooms, that the Jacksons
had a large company, and that we were understood by the servant to
be part of it. The Jacksons, thought we (I know my wife thought so,
although I never asked), give some people particular invitations. Her
object was now to make an honourable retreat, for, although my
dress was not entirely a walking one, and my wife’s cap was brought
with the prospect of making an appearance of dress, we were by no
means fit to match with those who had dressed on purpose for the
party, even although we were asked to join them. Just at this
moment, Mrs Jackson happened to cross the lobby, on hospitable
thoughts intent, and saw us, than whom, perhaps, she would rather
have seen a basilisk. “Oh, Mrs Balderstone, how do you do? How
are you, Mr Balderstone? I’m so delighted that you have come in this
easy way at last. A few of the neighbours have just dropped in upon
us, and it will be so delightful if you will join them. Come into this
room and take off your bonnet; and you, Mr Balderstone, just you be
so good as step up to the drawing-room. You’ll find numbers there
that you know. And Mr Jackson will be so happy to see you,”—&c.
All this, however, would not do. Mrs Balderstone and I not only felt a
little hurt at the want of speciality in our invitations to this house, but
could not endure the idea of mingling in a crowd better dressed and
more regularly invited than ourselves. We therefore begged Mrs
Jackson to excuse us for this night. We had just called in an easy
way in passing, and, indeed, we never attended ceremonious parties
at any time. We would see her some other evening, when she was
less engaged—that is to say, “we would rather see you and Mr
Jackson at Jericho than darken your doors again.” And so off we
came, with the blandest and most complimentary language upon our
tongues, and the most piqued and scornful feelings in our hearts.
Again upon the street—yea, once again. What was to be done
now? Why, said Mrs Balderstone, there is excellent old Mrs Smiles,
who lives in the next street. I have not seen her or the Misses Smiles
for six months; but the last time they were so pressing for us to
return their visit (you remember they supped with us in spring), that I
think we cannot do better than take this opportunity of clearing
scores.
Mrs Smiles, a respectable widow, lived with her five daughters in a
third floor in —— Street. Thither we marched, with a hope,
undiminished by the two preceding disappointments, that here at
length we would find supper. Our knock at Mrs Smiles’s hospitable
portal produced a strange rushing noise within; and when the
servant appeared, I observed in the far, dim vista of the passage,
one or two slip-slop figures darting across out of one door into
another, and others again crossing in the opposite direction; and
then there was heard a low anxious whispering, while a single
dishevelled head peeped out from one of the doors, and then the
head was withdrawn, and all was still. We were introduced into a
room which had evidently been the scene of some recent turmoil of
no ordinary kind, for female clothes lay scattered in every direction,
besides some articles which more properly belong to a dressing-
room. We had not been here above a minute, when we heard our
advent announced by the servant in an adjoining apartment to Mrs
Smiles herself, and some of her young ladies. A flood of obloquy
was instantly opened upon the girl by one of her young mistresses—
Miss Eliza, we thought—for having given admission to any body at
this late hour, especially when she knew that they were to be up
early next morning to commence their journey, and had still a great
many of their things to pack. “And such a room you have shown
them into, you goose!” said the enraged Miss. The girl was
questioned as to our appearance, for she had neglected to ask our
name; and then we heard one young lady say, “It must be these
Balderstones. What can have set them a-gadding to-night? I
suppose we must ask them to stay to supper, for they’ll have come
for nothing else—confound them! Mary, you are in best trim; will you
go in and speak to them till we get ourselves ready? The cold meat
will do, with a few eggs. I’m sure they could not have come at a
worse time.” Miss Mary accordingly came hastily in after a few
minutes, and received us with a thousand protestations of welcome.
Her mother would be so truly delighted to see us, for she had fairly
given up all hope of our ever visiting her again. She was just getting
ready, and would be here immediately. “In the meantime, Mrs
Balderstone, you will lay by your cloak and bonnet. Let me assist
you,”—&c. We had got enough, however, of the Smileses. We saw
we had dropped into the midst of a scene of easy dishabille, and
surprised it with unexpected ceremony. It would have been cruel to
the Smileses to put them about at such a time, and ten times more
cruel to ourselves to sit in friendly intercourse with a family who had
treated us in such a manner behind our backs. “These
Balderstones!” The phrase was wormwood. My wife, therefore, made
up a story to the effect that we had only called in going home from
another friend’s house, in order to inquire after the character of a
servant. As Mrs Smiles was out of order, we would not disturb her
that evening, but call on some other occasion. Of course, the more
that we declaimed about the impossibility of remaining to supper, the
more earnestly did Miss Smiles entreat us to remain. It would be
such a disappointment to her mother, and still more to Eliza and the
rest of them. She was obliged, however, with well-affected
reluctance, to give way to our impetuous desire of escaping.
Having once more stepped forth into the cold blast of November,
we began to feel that supper was becoming a thing which we could
not much longer, with comfort, trust to the contingency of general
invitations. We therefore sent home our thoughts to the excellent
cold duck and green cheese which lay in our larder, and, picturing to
ourselves the comfort of our parlour fireside, with a good bottle of ale
toasting within the fender, resolved no more to wander abroad in
search of happiness, unless there should be something like a
certainty of good fare and a hearty welcome elsewhere.
Thus it is always with general invitations. “Do call on us some
evening, Miss Duncan, just in an easy way, and, pray, bring your
seam with you, for there is nothing I hate so much as ceremonious
set calls,” is the sort of invitations you will hear in the middle ranks of
life, given to some good-natured female acquaintance, while you
yourself, if a bachelor, will in the same way be bidden to call “just
after you are done with business, and any night in the week; it is all
the same, for you can never catch us unprepared.” The deuce is in
these general invitations. People give them without reflecting that
they cannot be at all times ready to entertain visitors; cannot be so
much as at home to have the chance of doing so. Other people
accept and act upon them, at the risk of either putting their visitors
dreadfully about, or receiving a very poor entertainment. The sudden
arrival of an unexpected guest who has come on the faith of one of
these delusive roving invitations, indeed, in many instances,
disorganises the economy of a whole household. Nothing tries a
housewife so much. The state of her larder or cupboard
instantaneously flashes on her mind; and if she do not happen to be
a notable, and, consequently, not a regular curer of beef, or curious
in the matter of fresh eggs, a hundred to one but she feels herself in
an awkward dilemma, and, I have no doubt, would wish the visitor
any where but where he is. The truth is, by these general invitations
you may chance to arrive at a death or a marriage, a period of
mourning or rejoicing, when the sympathies of the family are all
engaged with matters of their own.
If people will have their friends beside them, let them, for the sake
of all that is comfortable, give them a definite invitation at once; a
general invitation is much worse than no invitation at all; it is little
else than an insult, however unintentional; for it is as much as to say
that the person is not worth inviting in a regular manner. In “good”
society, a conventional understanding obtains in the delicate point of
invitations; there is an established scale of the value of the different
meals adapted to the rank of the invited. I advise all my friends to
follow this invaluable code of civility. By all means let your invitations
have a special reference to time. On the other hand, if a friend
comes plump down with a request that you will favour him with your
company at a certain hour of the day, why, go without hesitation. The
man deserves your company for his honesty, and you will be sure to
put him to no more trouble than what he directly calculates on. But
turn a deaf ear, if you be wise, to general invitations; they are nets
spread out to ensnare your comfort. Rather content yourself with the
good old maxim, which somebody has inscribed over an ancient
doorway in one of the old streets of Edinburgh, Tecum Habita—
Keep at Home.
CONFESSORS.
It is a very general impression that the system of auricular

confession was given up at the Reformation. Such is by no means
the case; every man and mother’s son in the country still keeps his
confessor. By this epithet, it may be guessed, I mean that chief and
most particular friend whom every man keeps about him—who
stands his best man when he is married, and becomes his second
when he fights a duel—his double, in short, or second self—a
creature whom you almost always find with him when you call, and
who either walks under his arm in the street, or is found waiting for
him while he steps into some neighbouring shop, or, as the case
may happen, is waited for by him.
I make bold to say, there is not a trader any where who does not
keep his confessor. The creature haunts the shop, till he almost
seems the Genius of the Place, to the grievous prepossession of
newspapers, and, what is more intolerable still, to the exclusive
occupation of the ear of the worthy shopkeeper himself. The evening
is the grand revel-time for confessors of this genus. Between eight
and nine, you see them gathering to the shops of their respective
victims, like fowl to roost. As you pass about nine, you observe, on
looking in, that the discipline and rigour of shop-life has dissolved.
Master, men, and boys, feel the approach of the moment of
emancipation, with a peculiar salience of thought, alternating with a
deep and tranquil delight. The confessor reigns in the spirit of this
glorious hour, and his laugh, and his joke, and his news, and his
proffered pinch, are listened to, re-echoed, and partaken of by his
devotee, with a pleasure of the keenest nature, and ominous, you
may make sure, of oysters and gin punch on the way home.
In some shops, confessors cluster like grapes over a vintner’s
door. They block up the way of custom; and it is evident, in many
cases, that the devotee would rather lose the chance of a penny
from a customer, by omitting opportunities of attack, temptation, and
inveiglement, than lose the joke that is passing in the merry circle of
his confessors, which his ear drinks in as a precious aside, while he
only can spare a mere fragment of his attention—a corner of one
auditory organ—the front shop of his mind—to the real business
before him. In some shops, confessors get no encouragement
before dinner. The broad eye of garish day, in those fastidious
establishments, could no more endure such a walking personification
of idle gossip, than a ball-room, at high twelve, could tolerate the
intrusion of a man in a short coat, with a pen stuck in his ear. But this
is by no means the general case; and even in some instances,
where the front shop will not admit of such an appendage, ten to one
but, if the premises were well ransacked, you would find a specimen
of the class snug in some out-of-the-way corner, filling up the greater
part of his time with a newspaper, but every now and then resorted
to by his votary, in the intervals of actual employment, like an Egeria
receiving the visits of a Numa, and no doubt administering equally
precious counsel.
The more common position of a shopkeeper’s confessor is a chair
opposite the door, whence he may command a view of all that
passes on the street, with a full front inspection of every individual
that makes bold to enter. Into this chair the confessor invariably
glides as a matter of course. There he sits down, and, throwing one
limb over the other, considers himself entitled to inflict his company
upon the unhappy shopkeeper for any length of time. He notices, as
if he were not noticing, all that goes on in the premises. Not an order
is given for goods, not a payment made, or a pennyworth sold, but it
is seen, and very likely made the subject of after comment. It is of no
consequence to the confessor what description of customers enter
the place. Were a princess of the blood to come in, he would keep
his seat and his countenance equally unmoved, and a whole band of
ladies, driven in to escape a shower of rain, will not stir him from the
chair, to which he seems nailed, like the marble prince of the Black
Islands, in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The customers very
naturally feel disinclined to patronise a shop which is thus, as it were,
haunted by an evil spirit. “Oh, how I do hate to enter that shop of Mr
Such-a-thing,” says one young lady to another, “for every thing you
do or say is noticed by that odious person who is always lounging

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO

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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

First published in Great Britain 2022

Cover design by Terry Woodley

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9730-5

Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks

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1 Introduction: Toward a Medical-Environmental Humanities. Why Now?  1

Part I Conceptualizing Convergence: Econarratology and Narrative Medicine,

2 Narrative Knowing and Narrative Practice: Opportunities for Reciprocal Learning

6 Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses  63

7 The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction  73

9 Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities  97

Part II Environmental Toxicity and Public Health

10 Pathogenic (Auto)Ecologies: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Mechanisms in

11 Toward an Ethics of Transcorporeality and Public Health in Taiwanese

12 Slow Violence, Environmental Toxins, and Systemic Racism: Revisiting Lorde’s

Part III Varieties of Entanglement: Landscapes, Bodyscapes, Micro- and Macro-Biota

16 A Gut Feeling: The Emergence of Human Microbiota Conservation in the Peruvian

17 Performing Damaged Land-/Bodyscape in the Niger Delta: Transcorporeal

18 Scapegoating in Times of Pan-Epidemic: Mimesis, Identity Crisis, and the

Part IV Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergences of

21 Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment  263

23 (Un)sustainable Ecology: Modern and Indigenous Approaches to Health Care in

25 The Tales of Chinese Herbs: Rethinking Environmental Medicine through

26 Literary Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Intercorporeality in Aboriginal Australian

28 Expressing Concepts of Environment through Concepts of Madness in Some Irish

29 Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet  391

L ist of C ontributors  403

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Introduction: Toward a Medical-

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foregrounds the rubric of multi-scalar entanglement as a dominant metaphor. In addressing the

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Narrative Knowing and Narrative

In opening a state-of-the-field essay for the American Comparative Literature Association on

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NARRATIVE IN THE SCIENCE-FACING HUMANITIES

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1 Introduction: Toward a Medical-Environmental Humanities. Why Now? 1

6 Contagious History: The Imagination of the Viruses 63

7 The Grey Ecology of Zombie Fiction 73

9 Eco-Recovery Memoir and the Medical-Environmental Humanities 97

Part IV Exemplifying Specific Cultural Approaches to the Convergences of

21 Ayurvedic Vision on Health and Environment 263

29 Epilogue: Our Bodies, Our Minds, Our Planet 391

L ist of C ontributors 403