How to narrate malady?

George Rousseau was one of the founding fathers of the interdisciplinary field of Literature and Medicine during the 1970s. Where is the field now, fifty years on?

In this talk, Professor Emeritus Rousseau argues that literature and medicine (still) is the most sensitive interdisciplinary response to grief, loss and malady, not the least in old age. "Grief and loss is best narrated in art. Yet the doctors have taken charge thoughout this pandemic,” says Rousseau in this reflective talk recorded during lockdown.

George Rousseau is one of four invited Keynote Speakers at the upcoming Last Chapter Seminar. Rousseau a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society based at the University of Oxford and the recipient of honorary degrees honoris causa. He has been a Professor at UCLA, Regius Professor at King’s College Aberdeen, and was the Founding Co-Director of Oxford University’s Centre for the History of Childhood. Among Rousseau’s books is a trilogy about Enlightenment culture (1991) – Enlightenment Borders, Enlightenment Crossings, and Perilous Enlightenment; This Long Disease, my Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, 1968) written with Marjorie Hope Nicolson; The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (California, 1990); Gout: The Patrician Malady (Yale, 1998, with Roy Porter); Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); as well as Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (2004). His most recent book, Rachmaninoff’s Cape (London: Virtuoso) recently appeared in Russian translation.