On Jan. 28, the University Writing Program held the second annual installment of its Conversations about Writing & Medicine speaker series to explore the intricate relationship between the two fields. The first speaker was Emily Bloom, an assistant professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, who discussed the motivations around her award-winning debut memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art. Bloom was followed by Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the School of Medicine, who discussed her experiences examining reproductive care in incarcerated women. Dr. Jeremy Greene, a Hopkins professor and chair in the Department of the History of Medicine, moderated the following roundtable discussion.
Bloom’s memoir navigates her experience as a mother whose daughter was diagnosed with deafness and Type 1 diabetes after she and her husband were diagnosed as carriers for a rare genetic disorder. She especially wanted to emphasize the dual role of medical devices as great technological advancements as well as being expensive and emotionally burdensome in chronic diseases, utilizing the book format as a way to explore these concepts. Bloom was not without worries, however, about the impact writing a book would have on her young daughter who could not yet express her feelings and experiences.
“Anytime you write a memoir, especially about parenting, you drag a lot of people into it, people who don't really have a say in the matter,” she said. “These are all really, really good reasons not to write, and I'm sure there are many others… [Yet] I wanted to understand these medical technologies that were shaping my day-to-day life… I also wanted to understand motherhood [and the] intense expectations that I had for myself as a mother. I also wanted to better understand my daughter and what was possible for her life and her future.”
Bloom used her chapter on cochlear implants as an example, moving through history to explore the different types of technologies and inventions used to represent speech. While writing this chapter, she was also deciding whether or not her daughter should undergo cochlear implant surgery. Bloom credits her writing process to help her achieve a new understanding of the decision and its implications.
“The understanding that I sought had a very tangible effect in guiding our decision to have the procedure, even with full awareness of the uncertainty that underlies such a decision and such a decision that you're making for someone else, for a child. Writing was, for me, an important way of navigating the uncertainties of medical decision making.”
Lastly, Bloom revealed the inspiration behind the title of her book: a triptych by Louise Bourgeois where the phrase “I cannot control everything forever” is written.
Sufrin recounted her journey in becoming a physician anthropologist who focuses on writing about medical spaces such as incarceration. She credits her sophomore anthropology class with Deborah Gewertz at Amherst College as a significant milestone in her education, pointing out a specific assignment that encouraged her to pursue writing.
“The assignment was to comment on a headline or the cover of Time Magazine from earlier that month, about a newly postpartum mother who drove her minivan off of a bridge. Her children died. She survived. The headline said, ‘How could she do it?’ The assignment was to not answer that question, but to analyze how it is that we as a society came to ask that question… I wrote that assignment, and the comment the professor wrote on the first page was, ‘You should write more than prescriptions.’ She knew that I was headed for a career in medicine, or at least that I was strongly considering it, and she saw something in my writing that I had never seen before.”
Another experience Sufrin remembers is reading Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body, a book that explores how women’s reproduction is viewed and expressed in American culture and medical textbooks.
“It deconstructed the language that medical textbooks use to describe women's reproductive capacities, the metaphors that are used when describing conception and how militarized they are, how patriarchal…The very words both reflected gender norms and also reinforced them. That deep engagement with words in medicine and not taking for granted that medicine is just a practice of healing. There's a lot of social, political, economic, many forces of understanding and experience that go into what we then see as the ways that healing happens, therapeutics, doctors and patients relate.”
This caused Sufrin to explore ethnography, a subfield of anthropology that applies an immersive, observational perspective. Sufrin emphasized paying attention to language and descriptions used to collect information about customs and cultures. Sufrin’s focus on pregnant incarcerated women became crystallized when she helped deliver a baby for a woman who was shackled to the bed of a local jail. She cited a need to write about the experience and explore the morality of being a physician in a space of punishment.
“I felt like I needed the tools of ethnography to help me answer that question, to help me make sense of the contradictions I was seeing in this space… so my writing, my ethnography, comes from that, that deep moral sense of needing to question assumptions, being willing to confront one's own complicity in spaces and in medical processes that we may find ourselves in, ones that may even seem like they're harmful, and writing has been absolutely essential for sorting through those complex social, political, medical care-giving questions.”
Greene moderated the following roundtable, asking several questions before opening up the discussion to audience questions.
