AIDS and its treatments: two doctors' narratives of healing, desire, and belonging.
In this essay, I analyze two memoirs--Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS--which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical "pragmatics" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Diedrich
Lisa
L
Women's Studies Program, SUNY-Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA. ldiedrich@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000266:history / Q000628:therapy*; D000328:Adult; D003462:Cuba / Q000208:ethnology; D004645:Empathy; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007194:India / Q000208:ethnology; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D010819:Physician's Role / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D012928:Social Desirability; D012933:Social Identification; D014481:United States