James Emily
Lit Med. 2019;37(1):1-25. doi: 10.1353/lm.2019.0000.
In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf explores the "poverty of the language" in matters of illness and uncovers a lexical rift between patients and caregivers-one that continues to trouble contemporary medical culture. Even as her essay exposes and deplores the sick room's scant lexicon, Woolf herself worked to address these shortcomings throughout her career, steadily crafting a wider and more capacious vocabulary for illness. Such a language, she felt, could heighten the patient's ability to articulate the sensory nuances of illness and, in so doing, foster empathy for the ill. In arguing for the patient's expressive autonomy and advancing new models of humane caregiving, Woolf's writings and nascent lexicography anticipate the rise of narrative medicine in the twenty-first century.
在弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫1926年的散文《论生病》中，她探讨了疾病相关话题中“语言的匮乏”，并揭示了患者与护理人员之间的词汇鸿沟——这一鸿沟至今仍困扰着当代医学文化。尽管她的散文揭示并哀叹病房词汇的匮乏，但伍尔夫本人在其整个职业生涯中都致力于解决这些不足，稳步为疾病创造更广泛、更丰富的词汇。她认为，这样一种语言可以提高患者表达疾病感官细微差别的能力，并借此培养对患者的同理心。在主张患者的表达自主权并推进新的人文护理模式时，伍尔夫的作品和初现雏形的词典编纂工作预示了21世纪叙事医学的兴起。
