Blind but Seeing: Post-clinical Medicine in Jose Saramago's Blindness

<p>This project examines José Saramago’s <em>Blindness</em> (1996) in the context of two other narratives focused on plagues and epidemics – Daniel Defoe’s <em>A Journal of the Plague Year</em> (1722) and Albert Camus’ <em>The Plague </em>(1947) – each written at different points in time during the development of clinical medicine as chronicled by Michel Foucault’s <em>Birth of the Clinic</em>. The paper draws heavily upon Foucault’s work on clinical medicine, as well as a number of different theories of medical history, government policy, and cultural attitudes towards health and illness. The goal of the project is twofold: first, to examine how the traditional elements in narratives of plague interact with and change in the presence of the relatively new phenomenon of clinical medicine, and second, to understand how Saramago’s <em>Blindness</em> reveals and critiques these changes via a term I dub <em>post-clinical</em>. This demonstrates the ability of literary plague narratives to both understand and critique the medical industry at large.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Ftacek, Matthew J

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Russell Prather

• Literature
• Foucault
• Medicine
• Plague
• Defoe
• Camus
• Clinical Medicine
• Disease
• History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
• Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America
• Literature in English, British Isles

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.nmu.edu/theses/101

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.nmu.edu:theses-1124