A Rigorous Mind Meets Her Yielding Body: Intellectual Life and Meaning-Making in Wit

Patients, their family and friends, and medical professionals often consider the experiences of illness (and particularly terminal illness) as primarily physical, emotional, and spiritual. This is no doubt true, but for at least some segment of the patient population, their intellects, or intellectual lives, offer ways to frame and confront the complexity of the experiences of illness and dying, to consider the meaning of their lives, and to remember that they are more than their diseases. For these patients, the habits of the life of the mind, a life centered on gaining and sharing knowledge, are familiar and comfortable: They are accustomed to defining, analyzing, and assessing complex situations; they have a faith in knowledge and their intellectual abilities. Confronted with the illness and mortality of the body, such patients may find that these intellectual frameworks offer a way to make sense of these new experiences, to integrate them within their bodies of knowledge.

A few examples suggest the context for considering the intellect and meaning-making within illness and dying. In “The Median Isn't the Message,” the late Stephen Jay Gould offers “a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving, … a small story about the utility of dry, academic knowledge about science” (1). In other words, Gould shows readers that his informed reading of the survival statistics for his diagnosis, abdominal mesothelioma, provided a rational basis for choosing hope and buttressed his emotional resources. Author Barbara Ehrenreich approaches illness and mortality from a different intellectual angle, one informed by her experience with breast cancer. Her essay, “Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch,” analyzes the many ways that breast cancer culture operates in “normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience” (2) …