Imaging and Imagining Illness

"In this fascinating and quite unique book, Devan Stahl and some of those who love her offer a deep, rich, and at points quite moving insight into what it means to live into enduring forms of illness. The interdisciplinary approach is powerful in the way that it allows us to see Devan's illness experiences from a variety of perspectives. . . .I commend this book and I pray that it both informs and changes people's views on what it means to live humanly in the company of enduring illness."

--John Swinton, Professor, School of Divinity, King's College University of Aberdeen



"In Imaging and Imagining Illness, Devan Stahl breaks new ground in the now well-populated field of illness writing. Combining personal memoir, artwork, rigorous analyses from bioethics and medical humanities, and philosophical reflection, it offers fresh interdisciplinary insights into the experience of illness and disability in a technologized medical world. More than anything else I have read, Stahl's book shows the reader how the person in illness interweaves multiple perspectives to give meaning to their experience."

--Jackie Leach Scully, Executive Director, Policy Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre



"This transcendentally lyrical work is about relationships: between a woman and her body; between her-self and evolving life with an unpredictable illness; between a printmaker--her sister--and her materials; and between two sisters in narrative and graphic counterpoint. . . . Other voices--a literary scholar, a theologian, and a physician-philosopher--enhance the complexity and texture of the artistic pas-de-deux at the center of the book. Above all it reminds us of the potential, in Devan Stahl's words, that 'resistant acts of creation' have for humanity and emancipation."

--Arno K. Kumagai, Professor and Vice Chair for Education, Women's College Hospital, University of Toronto



"Blending the verbal and the visual, the personal and the scholarly, this unique volume takes us on a wondrous journey from patient to print and icon that will make readers look at medical images with an entirely fresh eye. The result is proof that illness narrative is an invitation to share vulnerability with others and of the transformative power of imaginative and collaborative perspectives on the ill body. It deserves to be widely read."

--Stella Bolaki, Author of Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture



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"Devan Stahl writes how 'becoming ill can be a fragmenting and isolating experience.' From this extreme and personal place something extraordinary has emerged--an investigation into illness, technology, interpretation and connection that is equally creative and scholarly, rigorously researched and visually arresting. This book of essays by some of our most exciting humanities scholars challenges us all to consider how technology alters how we appreciate and understand the body and our lives inside that body. 'Imaging and Imagining the Body' is an interdisciplinary marvel that grabs the reader by the heart."

--Jay Baruch, Author of What's Left Out and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients and Other Strangers