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AIDS and its treatments: Two doctors' narratives of healing, desire, and belonging

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Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)237-257
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Medical Humanities
Volume26
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2005

Keywords

  • Doctor-patient relationship
  • Empathy
  • Ethnicity
  • HIV/AIDS
  • Identity
  • Illness narratives
  • Sexuality
  • Suffering

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