Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

This dissertation reveals how cognitive disability's formal and rhetorical potential developed in the U.S. from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, detailing the ways in which writers determined the reader's engagement with cognitive others. Scientific pathology inspired literary authors to experiment with narrative mechanics. Conversely, literature and popular nonfiction revealed to psychologists unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as narrative's methodological and political potential. Cognitive disability, never fully assimilable, emerges as a force that can reorganize narrative events and aestheticize their telling. My work challenges theories of disability that prefigure difference as fixed or known in narrative. Great authors redefine disability as a force that is always coming to be known. I introduce a heuristic to help scholars understand this process, specifically how stories introduce tenuous ways of representing and narrating disability, put forth conflicting ontological claims about the mind, and withhold what can be known about disability at key moments. As readers struggle to pin down what exactly disability is, narrative places them in a space where they can reflect not only on the abilities of the disabled subject, but their own.

Committee: William Marling Dr. (Advisor); Athena Vrettos Dr. (Committee Member); Kimberly Emmons Dr. (Committee Member); Jonathan Sadowsky Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2017, English (Arts and Sciences)

Only relatively recently has paid nursing come to be viewed as a respectable profession for women. Early-nineteenth-century literature describes hired nurses as low-class, slovenly women who smoked, drank, and abused their patients. Middle-class British society feared that hired nurses were low-class, ignorant, unsympathetic, unfeminine, and too independent from men. Beyond Nightingale examines how literature from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century helped alleviate these fears and altered the public perception of nursing by presenting paid nurses as middle-class women who were sympathetic, selfless, and subservient to doctors. Many authors suggested that nursing ability was not dependent upon natural femininity or personal character, but relied on training and experience. By altering the public's perception of paid nursing, literary portrayals of nursing facilitated its transformation from an extension of the feminine, domestic sphere into an efficient medical profession for women. Beyond Nightingale examines works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and L. T. Meade, among others, to challenge the prevailing myth that Florence Nightingale single-handedly reformed nursing in the mid-1850s. Using World War I propaganda, periodicals, novels, and memoirs, Benham also explores how the desire for efficiency was encouraged and contested in literary portrayals of nursing from 1900 – 1918. Great War nursing literature emphasized efficiency as the most important objective in nursing care. As a result, sympathy was increasingly devalued because it hindered the efficiency of the medical machine. This tension between sympathetic and efficient care has not been resolved, but continues to plague the medical profession today. Beyond Nightingale considers not only traditional literary works, but also a variety of non-literary archival sources including nursing manuals, sanitary pamphlets, women's periodicals, and Voluntary Aid Deta (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor); Carey Snyder (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member); Albert Rouzie (Committee Member); Jacqueline Wolf (Other) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; History; Literature; Medicine; Nursing; Public Health; Sanitation; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1962, English

Committee: Charles O. McDonald (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This dissertation will present a novel corpus of eighteenth-century medical satires to perform a reparation on the secular epistemological terrain of the eighteenth-century Medical Enlightenment. It employs an allegorical method of interpretation informed by syncretic-feminist theology to a collection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature to demonstrate how the satirical mode was used to push back against the bodily technologies of the medical profession. This project helps us to identify the characteristic features of these topical satires, which voice a deep epistemological discomfort with the principles, methods, and practices of the emergent secular medical field. Medical satires feature narrators and targets that elide the figures of the physician and the satirist as humoral healers, scientific methodologies applied to absurd and bawdy topics, and a considerable amount of human and animal suffering resulting from poorly-applied medical treatments. This dissertation then reads Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a virtuosic representative of the medical satire subgenre whose narrator thoroughly foils both his own and a reader's attempt to rationalize and unify his creation and circumstance. This project hopes to offer literary and medical scholars an allegorical perspective into medicine's literary origins and entanglements to support the gradual recovery and revitalization of pre-Medical Enlightenment medical wisdom.

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member); David Brewer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Medical Humanities and Social Sciences

In this thesis, I use a close reading of two memoirs by existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom to develop a narrative approach to psychiatry. This approach treats each patient's story as a unique work of literature. It involves the psychiatrist's listening for literary elements such as tone, incongruity, and figurative speech in patient stories. It also requires the psychiatrist's engagement in cooperative acts of storytelling and interpretation, which, I suggest, provide insight into the patient's inner and outer life. This insight helps the psychiatrist to understand the patient's needs, whether these needs are psychosocial, neurobiological, medical, or otherwise. Ultimately, I argue that this approach prepares psychiatrists to respond creatively to the complex challenges of mental illness.

Committee: Aaron Friedberg (Committee Co-Chair); James Phelan (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Medicine; Mental Health; Psychotherapy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Greek and Latin

Animalization classifies women as non-human animals who must be tamed and controlled by marriage and motherhood. Our earliest written sources, like Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (7th c. BCE) and Semonides' Fragment 7 (7th c. BCE), describe women's body parts in animal terms to manipulate the actions and behavior of female characters for a male audience. Animalization continues to affect the treatment of women and animals today, particularly regarding voice, agency, and bodily autonomy. Using Julia Kristeva's (1985), Donna Haraway's (1985), and Carol J. Adams' (1990) theories, I propose a woman-as- animal spectrum where female-presenting individuals slide between neutral/domesticated/sacrificial animals and bestial/wild/hybrid monsters. Using this spectrum, I investigate the animalized female body in classical literature through women's skin, mind, and reproductive system and end with a discussion of how contemporary authors and artists are reclaiming animalization today. Because women develop from monsters in ancient cosmogonies, I argue in chapter 1, “Skin,” that Io, Callisto, Ocyrhoe, and Scylla in Ovid's Metamorphoses (1st c. CE) experience species dysphoria, anxiety and depression because their interior and exterior experiences do not match. Hindu and First Nations stories, however, show that women do not have to suffer when transforming into animals with whom they share a close kinship. In chapter 2, “Mind,” I explore three animal metaphors (snakes, dogs, and lions) through four women from Greek tragedy (5th c. BCE): Agave in Euripides' Bacchae, Creusa in Euripides' Ion, Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Oresteia, and Medea in Euripides' Medea. I then move to Roman tragedy (1st c. CE), where I argue that Seneca's Medea and Phaedra present the title characters as uniquely Roman manifestations of the woman-as- animal spectrum. I end by suggesting how tragic women can harness hybridity as a tool for promoting their own and their children's agency. In c (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Thomas Hawkins (Committee Chair); Dana Munteanu (Committee Member); Julia Hawkins (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient Languages; Animals; Classical Studies; Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Computer Science and Engineering

Digitalized scientific literature, as a special type of text articles, is considered valuable knowledge repository in widespread academic and practical settings. Biomedical literature has specifically played an important role in supporting evidence-based medicine and promoting quality healthcare. Given an information need such as a patient problem, information retrieval towards biomedical literature has been focusing on the identification of high relevant articles to support up-to-date knowledge synthetization and reliable decision making. In particular, high recall, high precision, and human involvement are expected for a rigorous information retrieval in healthcare. Despite the critical information needs requiring high effectiveness and efficiency, the information overload from the large volume and heterogeneous biomedical literature has placed challenges on that. In this dissertation, we propose an integrated and generalizable framework of text and visual analytics to facilitate the significant domain application of biomedical literature retrieval. We focus on the unmet and most challenging aspect of identifying high relevant articles from a text corpus, which is typically an article collection obtained via exhaustive literature search. We convert extensive biomedical articles to effective representations that encode underlying article meanings and indicate article relevancies; and promote advantageous visualizations to exploit and explore article representations so that humans can get involved in not only task accomplishment but also knowledge discovery. We first implement text analytics to generate machine-understandable article features and representations, and promote their effectiveness with multiple knowledge and computational resources. Consider the special format of biomedical literature, we start by investigating the fundamental lexical feature space consisting of diverse article elements and examine their usefulness in predicting article relevan (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Ritter Ph.D. (Advisor); Po-Yin Yen Ph.D. (Advisor); Raghu Machiraju Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Biomedical Research; Computer Science; Information Science

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

Patient narrative is often an undervalued or dismissed genre of writing in the field of literary criticism, largely because the hermeneutics of suspicion leads critics to see these texts as “misery memoirs,” as Ann Jurecic suggests. In this thesis, I argue for a new approach to reading and to criticism that moves away from the hermeneutics of suspicion and instead seeks to find conversations between patient narratives, case narratives, and popular or dominant medical and scientific texts. This shift would have readers focusing not on the ways in which an author might manipulate a story but instead on what the reader might learn from intently examining the resulting conversations. In doing so, I do not argue for a switch in the hierarchy—from doctor-patient to patient-doctor—but instead argue that both patient and case narratives have value; without both texts, we cannot have a full picture of what it is like to live with illness. Making my argument through historical examination, I prove that by examining Charlotte Perkins Gilman's patient narratives—those found in her letters, her diaries, and her autobiography as well as in “The Yellow Wallpaper”—alongside medical and scientific texts from her time, we can not only deepen and nuance current interpretations of these texts but we can also uncover motivations that may not be immediately apparent. While “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, has been considered as a critique of patriarchal medicine, a horror story, and a liberation text—among others—it has never been explicitly examined as a patient narrative. This focus allows us to delve deeper into the conversation created between “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Gilman's nonfiction narratives; I focus particularly on how we can see the eugenic arguments within “The Yellow Wallpaper” and how these arguments are connected to Gilman's anxieties about marriage, motherhood, and her usefulness in society. While ignoring patient narratives makes literary critics and histor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Thomas Scanlan (Committee Chair); Mary Kate Hurley (Committee Member); Myrna Perez Sheldon (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Families and Family Life; Gender; Gender Studies; Health; Health Care; Health Sciences; History; Literature; Medical Ethics; Medicine; Mental Health; Philosophy of Science; Psychology; Rhetoric; Science History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Germanic Languages and Literatures

The end of the nineteenth century marked the slow shift from home births towards an increased hospitalization of birthing, which became a firmly established practice in twentieth-century German-speaking countries. In this project, I analyze and contextualize representations of birthing, birthing assistants, and the medicalization of the female body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Helene Boehlau's Halbtier! (1899), Ilse Frapan's Arbeit (1903), and Gabriele Reuter's Das Traenenhaus (1908). Boehlau, Frapan, and Reuter wrote their novels at the cusp of a new approach to birthing, and their protagonists grapple with the transition from giving birth at home with minimal medical intervention to viewing birth as a pathological condition that requires support from medical personnel. By bringing together theoretical discourses on the body and on medicalization, I examine what effect the restructuring of birthing assistance, and later the development of the medical specialty of obstetrics, had on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how women perceived these changed birthing conditions. I argue that each of these literary works challenges the medical history narratives that have portrayed medical advances in obstetrics as a positive change for women across the world. Rather, these works take up questions of female agency and the human cost resulting from medical advancements. I identify the three authors' preoccupation with unwed mothers' birthing experiences and the socio-economic and moral factors that influence their patient care and access to health care as a crucial commonality between the works examined. The project begins with a historical overview of the medicalization of birthing in German-speaking countries and of the changing discourses about the female procreative body from the 1750s onwards. The subsequent three literature chapters focus on the portrayal of women's perceptions of the birthing experience, the loc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Barbara Becker-Cantarino PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Katra Byram PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Anna Grotans PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in French, aims at defining the possible interactions between medicine and literature in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit. It explores the ways in which the war between literature and science has settled in France from the 19th century onwards. We will contradict the theories claiming an incompatibility between literature and science. Furthermore, the analysis of the novel will draw the features of two new discourses, identified as medical literature and narrative medicine. In this way, reaching a compromise between the two disciplines will enable us to grasp a clearer definition of what literature is, as well as to highlight some new aspects of narratology, semiotics and modernism, that are related to the medical practice.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Anna Klosowska (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature