The translational turn in narrative medicine: A study of Margherita Guidacci’s Neurosuite

This essay invokes a translational turn in narrative medicine. My argument is grounded in two primary considerations: first, that illness is a fundamentally estranging experience resembling that of speaking a foreign language, and second, that discourses of and around health and disease have been dominated by narrative paradigms that have failed to capture the essentially translational (as in foreign and foreignizing) speech, or lack thereof, of those who suffer. This argument challenges the master plot of illness as narrative in favour of a disruptive idea of illness as translation. Margherita Guidacci’s Neurosuite (1999a; first published 1970)—a collection of 80 poems recounting the poet-patient’s experience of incarceration in a psychiatric hospital in Italy—serves as a primary source of translational epistemology and psychiatric knowledge. Through the analysis of selected passages, I demonstrate how translation itself is a self-critical concept and practice that invites us to question our beliefs and values, including the assumption that translating is always beneficial and harmless. At times, I argue, it is important to preserve the incommunicable and the untranslatable as ethical and just forms of knowledge, especially in contexts of psychiatric suffering. A translational approach to narrative medicine can assist us in addressing, and potentially exploiting, these epistemic gaps, thereby putting the experience of the sufferer at the forefront of both clinical and literary practice. A synopsis of this article can be found here.