The focus on cancer rehabilitation has increased, but breast cancer patients still report unmet rehabilitation needs. Since many women today will live long beyond their diagnosis, there are multiple challenges for the healthcare system in supporting these women in their new life situation. A more individualized approach is seen as necessary to optimize the rehabilitation for survivors. Pathographies, i.e., autobiographical or biographical accounts of experiences of illness, expose us to personal accounts of the journey through illness and treatment, offering us details, emotions, phrasings, and imagery from an individual perspective. In this literary study, we have analyzed two contemporary Swedish-speaking pathographies about breast cancer. In our analysis, we have presented perspectives on survivorship, and the authors’ ways of conveying their breast cancer experiences through narrative. The pathographies envision the prominent impact the breast cancer has on the authors’ lives. Narratives of survivorship have the potential to complement the more general medical knowledge with their nuanced and multifaceted stories of breast cancer. Learning from this type of material may improve the understanding of the complexity of breast cancer survivorship issues. This may be a way to become more attuned to identifying individual needs and preferences of breast cancer patients.

This article deepens the understanding of characteristic features of Shared Reading (SR) that can shed light on health benefits of this literary practice suggested by previous research. We provide a detailed analysis of language, interaction, reading strategies and collaborative meaning-making in an online SR group in which participants read and discussed a modernist poem. We triangulate our analysis with results from a focus group with the participants. Our study is informed by psychological theories about joint attention and its effects on social cohesion, mentalisation and perspective-taking. The analysis shows how the SR format provides a space in which ingroupness, intersubjectivity, and perspective-taking are created and realised in language use and interaction. Furthermore, our study suggests that many characteristic features of SR identified in earlier research can still be observed in an online SR group. The study lays the ground for more conclusive research of the benefits of this reading practice.

This article analyzes the immediate and long-term effects of medical humanities teaching at a Swedish medical degree program. The objectives, format, and core pedagogical ideas and practices of an elective course in medical humanities are presented, situating the learning experience in the wider context of medical humanities in the Nordics. We conducted a qualitative, thematic analysis of course evaluations amassed over 15 years and of open-ended responses in an alumni survey sent out in 2023. Using these two sources, we compare the students’ immediate perception of medical humanities’ contribution to their education with what they discern when looking back. The students report that medical humanities teaching advances an understanding and responsiveness to narratives and furthers an ability to balance the rational, bio-medical perspective with a more holistic empathetic view of patients and illness, providing a deeper and broader toolkit to work from in clinical practice. The students perceive that they have acquired a specific expertise, obtained training in perspective taking, and yielded personal growth and agency. The interpretative sensitivities and competencies reverberated in the alumni survey and were reported to influence subsequent clinical work. Our study suggests that the impact of medical humanities teaching is transferred to both occupational practice and personal life, and that the impact is long term.

Illness narratives can be said to reclaim the voice of the patient, and while they draw much of their strength from a position of experience and loss, they are also highly mediated and constructed narratives. This article studies, how these textual self-representations are formed in relation to intertexts, and how the authors explicitly use other literary texts and enter into a dialogue with them. Two pathographies are studied, Anders Paulrud’s Fjärilen i min hjärna (“The Butterfly in my Brain”, 2008) and Agneta Klingspor’s Stängt pga hälsosjäl (“Closed due to health reasons”, 2010, and their specific strategies in incorporating other literary texts: Paulrud through assemblage and community, and Klingspor through resistance and critique, especially of narratives the author feels she is supposed to appreciate. In the end, both authors seem to share a view about literature as potentially helpful and meaningful in conveying experiences and even point to a healing potential in narratives and literature.

Illness narratives can be said to reclaim the voice of the patient, and while they draw much of their strength from a position of experience and loss, they are also highly mediated and constructed narratives. This article studies, how these textual self-representations are formed in relation to intertexts, and how the authors explicitly use other literary texts and enter into a dialogue with them. Two pathographies are studied, Anders Paulrud’s Fjärilen i min hjärna (“The Butterfly in my Brain”, 2008) and Agneta Klingspor’s Stängt pga hälsosjäl (“Closed due to health reasons”, 2010, and their specific strategies in incorporating other literary texts: Paulrud through assemblage and community, and Klingspor through resistance and critique, especially of narratives the author feels she is supposed to appreciate. In the end, both authors seem to share a view about literature as potentially helpful and meaningful in conveying experiences and even point to a healing potential in narratives and literature.

Denna artikel analyserar Jessica Schiefauers spekulativa roman Bärarna (2020) och diskuterar konsekvenserna av att bygga ett samhälle utifrån smittoprevention. Romanen skildrar en framtid där en rabiesliknande sjukdom hotat att utplåna mänskligheten. I denna dystopi har män, som spridare av smittan, och kvinnor separerats för att förhindra återkomsten av sjukdomen. Artikeln undersöker hur romanen belyser de problem och faror som uppstår när smittoprevention blir ett centralt samhällsideal. Den diskuterar hur Schiefauer genom spekulativ fiktion skapar ett tankeexperiment där prevention dras till sin spets, vilket resulterar i ett samhälle präglat av både utopisk omsorg om hälsa och miljö och en dystopisk avhumanisering av smittbärare. Artikeln visar hur romanen varnar för riskerna med att bygga samhällen på rädsla och uteslutning, samt betonar vikten av att kritiskt granska smittopreventionens roll i samhällsbygget.