Beyond the Bedside

The proverbial “bedside” has long served as focal point for the field of literature and medicine as well as for its cousin, narrative medicine. Seen as the interface where patient meets provider, the bedside is imaginatively positioned as the place where health care occurs. In keeping with that emphasis, most existing scholarship in literature and medicine draws on literary works and other expressive culture as resources for understanding the illness experience, analyzing representations of medical practitioners, or probing^—and deepening^—patient-provider interactions. Health care in the United States, however, consists of a complex, often fragmented set of public and private institutions, political choices, financial arrangements, and people who play a wide range of roles both within and outside of clinical spaces. Such structural and infrastructural dimensions are at least as important as anything that transpires between individual providers and patients in determining who receives what type of care, on what terms, and at what cost. Philip J. Barrish explores literary engagements with this broader system, tracing how writers from the early twentieth century to the present have grappled not only with clinical encounters but also with the political and economic frameworks that shape them. Bringing together authors ranging from Charles Chesnutt and Sinclair Lewis to Helena María Viramontes, Barbara Kingsolver, and Edwidge Danticat, Beyond the Bedside examines topics such as fee-for-service medicine, the generational politics of Medicare and the racialized politics of Medicaid, the ethics of controlled drug studies, medicine's role in border enforcement, and the enduring influence of racial and class hierarchies in health care. By foregrounding these non-clinical dimensions, Beyond the Bedside shows how literary analysis can illuminate the systems that structure care as much as the encounters in which care is delivered and received. In doing so, the book expands the scope of literature-and-medicine scholarship and sharpens our ability to address questions of health justice, demonstrating literature's value for investigating the structures and infrastructures that connect the clinical bedside to the wider social world.