UCLA

My dissertation explores fictional medical narratives in late imperial China by focusing on representations of sickness, with particular attention to the patient. I argue that these fictional medical narratives produced a unique representation of sickness in terms of the patient’s subjective experience of an identity crisis. Through various patients’ individual experiences in fictional medical narratives, it can be seen that “sickness” indicates not only an unhealthy state, but also a process that uncovers disorders of family, ethics, and power structures, and can lead to the remaking of social identities and interpersonal relationships. As the rise of vernacular fiction as a narrative genre during the late Ming was closely related to the contemporary obsession with individual desire, the study of fictional medical narrative will help us understand and contextualize the new emphasis on the value of the individual. This dissertation takes fictional representations of sickness as a lens through which the tension between patients’ subjectivity and socially normative models is made manifest. I define the medical narrative in Ming-Qing vernacular fiction as a story that focuses on a character’s experience of illness and on the way illness influences the character’s social life and interpersonal relationships. In other words, it is the existence and the experience of the patient that constitutes the central feature of fictional medical narratives. Around the existence and the experience of the patient, the other characters have various responses and perform various roles, thereby contributing to the construction of the patient as a distinct type of character. We can conclude that these vernacular stories reflect the humanization of medicine, transforming the typology of patients in non-fictional medical narrative into various descriptions of patients as “whole persons in contexts and relations.” Fictional medical narratives reflect a more complex understanding of the cause, progress, and result of the sickness, revealing how patients’ experiences of suffering go beyond physical symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment. Therefore, fictional medical narratives formulate and convey contemporary understandings of the social meanings of illness in a way not found in other kinds of texts.