Ricardo Rato Rodrigues

Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Instytut Filologii Romańskiej, Faculty Member

University of Nottingham, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, Graduate Student

Queen Mary, University of London, Iberian and Latin American Studies, Faculty Member

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Introduction: Trauma and Textualities

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2020

This special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities focuses on papers from an International H... more This special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities focuses on papers from an International Health Humanities Network conference held in Nottingham, UK. Informed by the centenary of World War I, the theme of 'trauma' was chosen, and the presentations over the lively three-day meeting included a wide range of topics such as trauma in literature and text; managing trauma in clinical practice related to domestic violence and abuse; a theatrical performance involving trauma, personal history and theory; and using humanities in clinical education to offer new ways of making sense of and addressing trauma. To underscore the value of taking such a diverse approach, it is worth considering that trauma in the psychosocial sense is a relatively recent arrival to the medical and social sciences. It was only in the 1970s that post-traumatic stress disorder found its way into the lexicon of those helping Vietnam veterans and only in 1980 that it found its way into DSM III. Of course, there had been earlier attempts to characterize the malaise of serving or ex-combat personnel with terms such as 'nostalgia', "shell shock', 'combat fatigue' and so on finding their way into the literature in earlier conflicts. The point, however, is that the difficult sequelae of adverse experiences had been largely formulated, conceptualized, discussed, and perhaps consoled outside of formal medical settings for much of human history. Therefore, it is no surprise that these experiences have found prominent roles in drama, literature and visual media, as imaginative works have often been the most important and accessible fora in which such experiences could be understood and communicated. As one of the earliest documented forms through which stories are told and appreciated, the legends of classical antiquity have featured prominently in attempts to make sense of trauma. Hence, Laura McKenzie reflects on Robert Graves' attempts to grapple with his own World War I experience through his work, 'The Anger of Achilles'. The First World War also transformed the way experiences of this kind were written about in the contemporary fiction of the period. As Samantha Walton describes, this can be seen in the way that inter-war writers addressed nature, and the way that nature was evoked almost nostalgically, as something that had been sullied by human destruction yet nevertheless remained intertwined with human life. Sometimes, accounts of trauma are metaphorical and allegorical. As Jenny Cochrane argues here, the story of Dr. Doolittle represents a response to the trauma in the trenches of World War

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