Teresa Casal | University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (original) (raw)

Books by Teresa Casal

Beyond Diagnosis: Relating the Person to the Patient - The Patient to the Person, 2014

Thank you, I feel so much more like a person now,' I told the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurse aft... more Thank you, I feel so much more like a person now,' I told the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurse after the morning bath. The words came out spontaneously, and she was startled. What made me feel 'more like a person' at a time when my life was at risk, and I was tied to machines and entirely dependent on others' care? If becoming a patient entails the experience of vulnerability and ultimately the exposure to one's mortality, how does a patient remain a person in the midst of acute illness? Can a patient remain a person if she is regarded primarily as a malfunctioning body and/or mind? To what extent is the patient's self-perception shaped by others' perceptions of her? Can she contribute by reshaping those that prove harmful? By arguing for the need to listen to the patient's 'biological and biographical stories' in the interest of good clinical practices, John Launer pinpoints the limitations of a biomedical approach that splits the body from the person, and argues for the need to reconnect biology and biography within the therapeutic relation. 1 Indeed, one of the most striking conclusions of Klitzman's study on doctors who became patients is the stigmatisation of patienthood among the medical profession. Not only did doctor-patients feel diminished as patients and experienced the dissociation between body and person, but they also complained of the split between professional and personal responses from their colleagues. 2 The patient's split between body and person thus seems to find a correlate in the physician's split between professional and person, and both may be symptomatic of pervasive cultural practices. How to connect biology and biography, the professional and the personal in the clinical encounter is the question addressed in this chapter, which draws on personal testimony, illness memoirs, and literature on clinical practice.

Human beings are patients-in-waiting, waiting for a diagnosis that will confirm their patienthood... more Human beings are patients-in-waiting, waiting for a diagnosis that will confirm their patienthood. As consumers of patient caring services we are all required to submit to its technologies and, in an uneasy alliance with professionals, forced to conform to an appropriately objectified patient identity. The authors in this collection, themselves service providers and users, question whether technology on its own can ever be a complete and effective response to illness. They suggest that health professionals may be increasingly challenged to effectively balance genuine therapeutic service relationships that meet the personal needs and serve the agency of patients with the sometimes alienating application of the essential technologies of therapy. This book proposes that patients and their helpers are first and foremost people. It challenges service practices that distance people from healthy professional interpersonal connections and supports the active preservation of human relating as a core driver of therapeutic care.

Papers by Teresa Casal

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2022

Advances in healthcare information systems and administration book series, May 19, 2023

Introduction to this volumeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Neste capítulo apresentam-se duas propostas de tradução para textos de dois autores irlandeses: “... more Neste capítulo apresentam-se duas propostas de tradução para textos de dois autores irlandeses: “I am one of the people” de Glenn Patterson, inicialmente apresentado em Bruxelas em 2001, e “Learning to Grieve for Our Enemies” de Hugo Hamilton, contributo do autor para From the Republic of Conscience (2008), uma iniciativa conjunta da secção irlandesa da Amnistia Internacional e do Irish Times para assinalar o 60º aniversário da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pain: Management, Expression, Interpretation, 2011

's Monologues: Introductory Note T his section features four monologues by Jennifer Johnston, non... more 's Monologues: Introductory Note T his section features four monologues by Jennifer Johnston, none of which has been published previously in book form. Two of them, Seventeen Trees (2007) and I Have Desired to Go (2008), are published in their original versions, while the remaining two, Billy e Christine (2004), are the Portuguese translations of Mustn't Forget High Noon and O Ananias, Azarias and Miseal, both premiered in 1989. Seventeen Trees was Jennifer Johnston's generous and original contribution to Rising to Meet You. It was written after a visit to France in 2007, where the memorials and scars of World War II imprinted on the landscape of Normandy prompted the writer to delve into the emotional and sensorial imprints left in the mindscape of those who experienced and witnessed the terror of warfare: "I know what terror is. It was in my mouth, in my head, in my belly, in my mother's hand that held mine." It is both as witnesses to terror and reminders of life that the seventeen trees stand: they honour lives irrevocably lost, just as they embody life's renewal; they remind us of life's resilient power, as well as of its utter fragility; they face us with our options: nurturing life or crushing it, bearing in mind that life, like terror, is embodied, and bodies are frail and precious homes. Jennifer Johnston's imaginative and empathic trajectory, from mindscape to landscape and back again, from national histories to personal life stories, and from the present to the past and back to the present via "terror," is further undertaken in her next monologue, I Have Desired to Go.

In Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince," the prince lived all his life "in the Palace of Sans-S... more In Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince," the prince lived all his life "in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow was not allowed to enter". He was the happy prince who played in the daytime, danced in the evening and "never cared to ask what lay beyond" the "very lofty wall" that ran round the garden. So it is only when he dies and is set up "so high that [he] can see all the ugliness and all the misery of [his] city," that "though [his] heart is made of lead yet [he] cannot choose but weep" (Wilde Works, 272). Death liberates the prince from his constricted perception sheltered by the garden wall and, by affording him insight into others' lives, changes his former happiness, "if pleasure be happiness," into compassion and attending ethical responsibility. Focusing on non-fictional and fictional memoirs, respectively Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People (2003) and The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006), and Jennifer Johnston's The Gingerbread Woman (2000), this paper addresses the experience of those who find themselves perceiving the world from outside the walls of the Palace of Sans-Souci, and who as a result try to work out how their perception may both belong to, and change, the prevailing picture of the world they inhabit. As shown in Wilde's story, the Palace of Sans-Souci is an equivocal place where life without cares (sans-souci) is also a life without caring, and where unaware ness of one's situatedness in the world is directly linked to unawareness of others' existence and respective situation in the world. In turn, the prince's care and awareness of diversity proceeds from the gap between his perceptions outside the palace and his former perception inside the palace, which had remained uncontaminated by extramural contact. In Hamilton's memoir and Johnston's novel, this gap consists in the narrators' painful realisation that their experience deviates from dominant monological narratives of identity, specifically of Irish national identity. In both cases shaping their stories is inextricably linked to listening to others' stories. Personal identity is therefore developed within an interpersonal dialogical context, and rendered as a process that sharpens the narrators' and the readers' alertness to perspective and awareness of diversity. Hamilton's memoir and Johnston's fictional memoir thus enact the challenge to broaden ethical possibility by overtly exploring aesthetic possibility.

This chapter rereads James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (Dubliners, 1914) alongside Emma Donoghue’s ‘Speaki... more This chapter rereads James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (Dubliners, 1914) alongside Emma Donoghue’s ‘Speaking in Tongues’ (Touchy Subjects, 2006) so as to consider how they represent love, desire and the longing for intimacy in their respective historical contexts, and specifically whether self-sacrifice, rated as the ultimate proof of love in ‘The Dead’, persists or is replaced by different configurations of love and intimacy in Donoghue’s contemporary Ireland.

Thank you, I feel so much more like a person now,” I told the ICU nurse after the morning bath. T... more Thank you, I feel so much more like a person now,” I told the ICU nurse after the morning bath. The words came out spontaneously, and she was startled. What made me feel “more like a person” at a time when my life was at risk, and I was tied to machines and entirely dependent on others’ care? If becoming a patient entails the experience of vulnerability and ultimately the exposure to one’s mortality, how does a patient remain a person in the midst of acute illness? Can a patient remain a person if she is regarded primarily as a mal-functioning body and/or mind? To what extent is the patient’s self-perception shaped by others’ perceptions of her? Can she contribute to reshape those that prove harmful? By arguing for the need to listen to the patient’s “biological and biographical stories” in the interest of good clinical practices, John Launer pinpoints the limitations of a biomedical approach that splits the body from the person, and suggests that “healing” requires reconnecting bio...

Cultural Dynamics of Play

Hope in All Directions

I hope that I am not deprived of old age. (...) Perhaps I don‟t have to wait for old age for that... more I hope that I am not deprived of old age. (...) Perhaps I don‟t have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass (...), insensible of mortality and desperately mortal‟ – thus concludes Gillian Rose‟s memoir Love’s Work, written as she was dying of cancer. Likewise, in Not the Last Goodbye, David Servan-Schreiber plans to talk to his children of his „hopes for them‟ when he is no longer there, but postpones doing so „as long as I still have the hope of recovering‟ – though as a doctor he knew that this was „not just any relapse. It was the relapse.‟ My aim in this paper is to consider hope in the face of life-threatening illness and the prospect of death. How do you both contemplate the possibility of your imminent and premature death, and resort to all the energy you need to cope with painful treatments of uncertain outcome? How do you cling to life and prepare to let go of it? What role does hope play in how you experience your „desperately mortal‟ condition, live the present, and project yourself into a future you may not share? What is the relation between hope and the unknown? I propose to address these questions as they are rendered in Rose‟s and ServanSchreiber‟s memoirs. Respectively a philosopher and a physician, they write from the edge of death, as the physical borders on the metaphysical. What prompts them to write? How do they inscribe their perplexing present into their recollected past and precarious future? How do they cast their life and imminent death vis-a-vis the lives of their living and dead ones? In their respective idioms, these testimonies beg us to consider whether hope in the face of the unknown translates as connectedness, and whether bearing witness is part of hope‟s work.

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts

This paper focuses on the interplay between fiction, biography, and act history as it is rendered... more This paper focuses on the interplay between fiction, biography, and act history as it is rendered in Harrier Scott Chessman's novel "Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper" (2001), itself part of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century multifaceted responses to the art and life of women Impressionists. Chessman recreates the relation between the American painter Mary Cassatt and her older sister Lydia, who poses for Mary at a time when she is increasingly debilitated by the disease that would lead to her premature death. The novel, which stages a dialogue between Mary's gaze and Lydia's voice, is structured in five chapters, each corresponding to a particular painting and inviting us into the scene and the various interactions attending its composition. By stepping imaginatively into Cassatt's pictorial scenes through the voice of the unknown sister, the novelist replicates the close-up point of view adopted in Cassatt's figure painting so as to engage both with Cassatt's tlfe and art. This study examines Chessman's fictional rendering of the relationship between the painter and the model, as well as between fleeting life and the artistic attempt to arrest it, and considers how the novel addresses the limits and possibilities of word and image to capture life as it is perceived in the face of death.

Beyond Diagnosis: Relating the Person to the Patient - The Patient to the Person, 2014

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jun 28, 2022

Advances in healthcare information systems and administration book series, May 19, 2023

Introduction to this volumeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pain: Management, Expression, Interpretation, 2011

Cultural Dynamics of Play

Hope in All Directions

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts

Advances in Medical Education, Research, and Ethics

Pharmacy education is largely based on learning elements of disease and the corresponding element... more Pharmacy education is largely based on learning elements of disease and the corresponding elements of treatment, using the natural sciences and the biomedical perspective. While this is central for competent pharmacists in working on the research, production, and use of drugs, many professionals deal with people suffering from ill-health. Developing clinical roles requires, besides the traditional pharmaceutical knowledge, the ability to understand illness experiences from the perspectives of patients and significant others. Health humanities provide important resources to link human traits and biomedical knowledge, essential for sensitive and responsive pharmacy practice. The chapter aims to explore emerging opportunities for pharmacists' thinking and working with patients offered by the developing movement of health humanities and narrative medicine.