How did you decide to work at the intersection of literature and women’s health?
I trace my interest in narrative medicine back to my childhood experiences of accompanying my grandmother as a hospice volunteer, especially during the height of the AIDS crisis—she was one of few volunteers in Houston willing to work with these patients. Seeing sick and dying people whose voices were not being heard by the medical community or by society more generally sparked something for me that I later explored in a thesis on women’s memorial poetry and then a dissertation on breast cancer narratives. As I saw troubling trends here in the U.S., including the rising rate of maternal mortality (particularly for Black women) and reduced access to healthcare for women, I sought ways to connect my research and teaching with some of the social issues that matter to me. That led me to collect the texts about women’s health for a class I was teaching and then for my book. Having access to these narratives allows readers to hear (and hopefully learn from) the voices of women from the past.
What is the most surprising thing you learned or encountered in compiling the primary texts for your book, Women’s Health in Britain and America?
Throughout my research and collection of texts, I was consistently surprised and frightened by the many parallels between our current discussions of women’s health and those of the past. I knew these existed from past reading, but they became increasingly clear as I was selecting excerpts and then writing the introductions for each chapter.
I’ll share an example from the section on pregnancy and childbirth. As I was collecting narratives to include, it became clear how terrified many women were of dying during the birthing process. For women of the nineteenth century, particularly those giving birth before antiseptic medical procedures were widely practiced, postpartum infection was a significant risk. Their fears were heightened because childbirth was—and remains—one of the most common reasons women enter the medical system. Not only did women frequently experience pregnancy and childbirth, but they also saw the experiences of their friends and family members, likely knowing a woman who had died in childbirth. This fear became more pronounced when women recognized that many medical professionals did not listen to or believe women’s concerns about postpartum symptoms and thus failed to treat cases until the infection was no longer treatable.
While healthcare has certainly improved over the past two centuries, maternal mortality rates still suggest how dangerous the birthing process is in many parts of the world. There’s a reason reducing the global maternal mortality ratio is the first target of SDG 3. The U.S. is one of only seven countries worldwide that has seen a significant increase in the rate of women dying from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth since 2000 (for more, see data from the World Health Organization here or this 2025 report from the Commonwealth Fund). While these statistics alert us to troubling trends, narratives of birthing experiences help us to understand the ways that women’s concerns are often dismissed in medical settings. Several years ago, tennis player Serena Williams shared with Vogue magazine her life-threatening postpartum complications that were ignored by doctors and nurses. If Williams—one of the greatest athletes of all time who clearly understands her body and has access to the best medical care possible—can have such complications and be completely dismissed by medical professionals, average pregnant people (and particularly women of color) have every right to be afraid, not just of possible complications but of having their symptoms ignored or their concerns dismissed. If we want a system where medical professionals listen to patients, narrative medicine is more important than ever.
Why is it important to consider literature and the humanities more broadly in addressing SDG 3?
The field of narrative medicine highlights the many ways that listening to patients is crucial to ensuring every person (or as SDG 3 lists it, “all at all ages”) receives good care. Rita Charon has defined the mission of narrative medicine as seeking “to improve healthcare by recognizing the persons who seek help with their health.” Recognizing patients as people requires training for practitioners to learn how to listen closely, so narrative medicine borrows strategies from the literary practice of close reading. Clinicians who learn to read narratives closely in print, paying attention to style and language, can then apply that skill to listening closely in direct interactions with a patient.
However, narrative medicine can be applied beyond training medical practitioners to listen to their patients: it can also teach us how to advocate for ourselves and our loved ones in medical settings. Readers are trained to sympathize with the characters in our readings, so whether a patient fights for better care or remains silent in the face of inadequate care, our mental advocacy for a literary patient can help us to consider how to approach similar situations in our own lives. And because the medical practitioners are often framed as main characters and asheroes fighting disease, literature provides countless examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ doctors for our consideration.
Charon also explains that narrative medicine benefits patients by “open[ing] up healthcare to more trust, more accurate knowledge about one another, and more justice.” That change is important for everyone, even those who consider themselves ‘healthy’ or who are coming from positions of privilege, as we will each take our turn (some more than others) in the role of patient over our lifetime.
Tell us about your current work on women’s good health and wellness.
In my current research, I’m exploring how print media has shaped women’s relationship with wellness since the nineteenth century. Specifically, I’m indexing the contents of English-language women’s magazines from around the world, focusing on articles and advertisements that suggest how women proactively worked (or were advised) to maintain good health at each age, starting before puberty and continuing until well after menopause.
So far, I’ve found that women’s periodicals frequently prioritized domestic duties and feminine behaviors over medical accuracy, which restricted readers’ access to proven medical information and instead made them responsible for personal, family, and household health. They also prioritized advice for young women and those of childbearing years, mostly ignoring women at any later stage of life. These two editorial practices perpetuated the dismissal of women’s medical complaints as hysteria or invalidism, a pattern that has shaped women’s healthcare well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, we can draw a direct line from the pages of historic women’s magazines to a scroll of social media today. When we contextualize our present moment with this historical research, it’s clear that wellness content has long been a way to control women’s bodies and behaviors.