Katharine Murphy introduces the Reading Bodies takeover and discusses what historical discourses of illness in European literatures and cultures contribute to the medical humanities.
Over the last two years, the AHRC-funded Reading Bodies project (2023–2025) has examined representations of bodies and minds in Spanish and European literatures and cultures, contributing to the rapidly-growing field of multilingual medical humanities. Bringing together specialists in modern languages, medical humanities, creative writing, public health and psychology, the project traces the development of discourses of illness in literary fiction and other cultural media from the 1870s to the 1960s, with attention to their legacy in the present day.
Reading Bodies in European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)
As detailed in my previous piece for The Polyphony (Murphy 2024), this multilingual project has sought to address the relative under-representation of Hispanic studies research in the wider field of medical humanities. To achieve this objective, the project has facilitated exchanges between specialists working on literary and cultural engagements with health, illness and medical sciences in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and German studies. Ensuring coherence of research objectives and shared insights, the research network met regularly online during the first year of the grant, bringing together scholars based in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. In 2024, we held two international academic workshops at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the University of Exeter respectively. These events provided a foundation for our extended special issue on “Reading bodies: Narrating illness in European literatures and cultures (1870s to 1960s and beyond)” (Murphy and Glaze 2025a), which presents ten articles on literature, journalism and visual art across four language areas (Hispanic, French, Portuguese and Italian studies).
This special issue aims to promote the value of analysing a range of European literary and cultural representations of the body from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. The first five articles consider national, transnational and decolonial narratives, thereby foregrounding arguments that deconstruct dominant racialised historiographies of illness. The special issue opens with an analysis of colonial epidemiology and disease management in Sartre’s Typhus, followed by the transatlantic movement of people and diseases between Spain and Latin America, and varied engagements with national and transnational discourses of degeneration by Spanish authors. The second half of the special issue considers the relationship between gender and illness in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature in Spain, France and Portugal, alongside Italian film, thereby highlighting ideological constructions and gendered interpretations of medical symptoms and their treatment.
The project’s focus on historical, medical and social discourses casts light, we contend, on underlying structural causes of health inequalities through our close attention to social, cultural and ideological factors that continue to affect health outcomes in the present day. Moving beyond the recuperation of patient’s voices and narrative medicine prominent in so-called “first-wave” medical humanities, the Reading Bodies project fits squarely within the development of the critical medical humanities (Whitehead and Woods 2016) due to its historical, transcultural and multilingual foundations.
Through collaboration between members of the project network, we have aimed to develop and extend established critical emphasis on the social, historical and cultural contexts of illness. Lennard J. Davis (2008: 21–23), for example, recognises that “both disease entities and treatments are very much products of the explanatory systems used and the times in which they arise. […] [I]llnesses are distinctly tied to the historical moment.” This perspective does not negate the lived realities of illness, but instead deconstructs the ideological systems around which cultural biases continue to affect medical diagnosis and treatment (Cleghorn 2021). For example, our research builds on compelling evidence that medical diagnosis and treatments continue to be developed largely with reference to male physiology (Criado Perez 2020), thereby perpetuating significant inequalities for women’s health, as feminist scholarship has highlighted (McGregor 2021; Jackson 2019).
Health conditions past and present may be interpreted, in this context, both as lived realities and as examples of cultural myth-making about the body and mind. By considering case studies of ideologically-driven explanations for illness across cultural texts in four language areas, and illuminating the ongoing relevance of historical biases and their continuities in the present day, the Reading Bodies project has sought to extend the field of global and multilingual medical humanities. With these priorities in mind, the project has explored what we can learn from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical discourses of ill-health, their interactions with literary representation, and the ways in which these discourses function as precursors for ideological interpretations of illness in the present. The analysis of racialised, gendered, classist and ableist inequalities in European literatures and cultures in the past continues to have powerful relevance for disease management and health outcomes.
Public engagement: from neurasthenia to burnout in creative writing and artwork
My own research for the Reading Bodies project has explored literary engagements with gendered and classist interpretations of neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) in early twentieth-century Spanish fiction, highlighting both the ideological resonance of the term and its afterlives in present-day conceptualisations of burnout (Murphy 2025). The World Health Organization (2019) classifies burnout as an “occupational phenomenon […] resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” By considering the afterlives of turn-of-the-century discourses about neurasthenia, our public engagement work has sought to critically reframe the established medical definition of burnout, by exploring its gendered relationship to personal and professional caregiving roles, along with prevalent cultural myths about this term.
The research data collected for this strand of the project suggests that historical knowledge of the differential applications of nervous symptoms to a range of demographic groups can provide a valuable perspective from which to critique widespread preconceptions and misapprehensions about medical conditions in the present day. Based on the premise that, like neurasthenia, burnout is a contested term that needs to be approached critically, the project has explored the importance of lived experience for understanding its social and cultural implications. This research builds on and extends scholarship such as Anna Katherina Schaffner’s (2016) fascinating history of exhaustion by developing the multilingual, transcultural, pan-European framework that underpins both the academic framework and public engagement for the Reading Bodies project.
This strand of our research was developed through an in-person creative workshop, held in Exeter in June 2024, attended by a group of participants including health practitioners, teachers, educators, creative writers, illustrators and members of the public with lived experience of burnout and fatigue. The workshop began with mini-presentations about our research perspectives on the chosen themes by members of the research team, comprising specialists in modern languages and cultures, English and creative writing, public health and psychology. Participants were asked to communicate their own understanding of the term, and its relevance to contemporary society, from a professional or personal viewpoint.
We invited participants to consider representations of neurasthenia and burnout in selected literary extracts and paintings, from the past and present, as inspiration for their own creative responses. The rationale was both to consider the longevity of historical perspectives on this theme, and to explore the ways in which participants’ understanding either reinforced or expanded the established medical definition of burnout, its causes and symptoms. Our prompt materials included turn-of-the century paintings about fatigue and exhaustion, such as Ramon Casas’ Joven decadente: después del baile (1899) [Young Decadent: After the Dance]. Examples of literary extracts comprised translations of Pío Baroja’s Mala hierba (1904) [Weeds (1923)], Elvira Navarro’s La trabajadora (2014) [A Working Woman (2017)] and Mary F. Robinson’s poem “Neurasthenia” (in Bauer [2008] 2023). This event was followed by an open call for submissions, which elicited responses locally, nationally and internationally, leading to an edited anthology on Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience (Flint and Murphy 2024).
The anthology has been disseminated via our project website and the Behavioural and Cultural Insights into Health Hub, a platform for driving healthy practices in collaboration between the University of Exeter and WHO Regional Office for Europe. Both our workshop and resulting anthology give voice to lived experience of burnout, overload and resilience through creative expression. By sharing the anthology of poetry, stories and artwork on these themes, we hope to inspire readers, including health and wellbeing practitioners, to explore the value of incorporating creativity into their personal lives and professional roles.
Responses from health practitioners who contributed to the project include:
This experience has influenced my therapeutic approach, making me more intentional in encouraging my patients to explore creative expressions.
As a clinical psychologist, contributing to the Reading Bodies project has certainly impacted many aspects of my work. […] I think more about the language we use in different settings and how culture and society influence the ways in which we put our inner experiences into words.
These creative interventions cast light on a range of factors that contribute to personal and workplace burnout, foregrounding the language and metaphors that are useful for facilitating open discussion of people’s experience. Through this initiative, we are interested in exploring the value of both reading and writing literary fiction, poetry and life writing about mental health themes. In summary, the activities have allowed us to consider the therapeutic value of literature beyond the potential limitations of “creative bibliotherapy” (Berthoud and Elderkin 2013), which prescribes tailored recommendations of fiction to support physical and mental health. In this context, researchers and recent media coverage (e.g. Zimmer 2025) have cautioned that although “fiction can have a positive impact on measures of mood and emotion, […] exposure to fiction does not, on its own, have an immediate impact on well-being” (Carney and Robertson 2022, 1).
By contrast with the albeit appealing possibility that immersion in literature can provide cost-effective therapeutic relief for a range of health conditions, instead we have sought to explore the role of creative expression and linguistic terminology for understanding individual experiences of health and illness. In this sense, we have explored participants’ responses to both reading and writing through the incorporation of what could be termed “creative scriptotherapy” (therapeutic writing) and “logotherapy” (finding meaning in discourse). Through engagement with these interdisciplinary concepts about narrative and linguistic expression, the Reading Bodies project thereby underscores the value of literature for conveying both lived and imagined realities, and for shaping societal understanding of health and illness.
Readers can find more information about our activities via our project website and the Reading Bodies Multilingual Network on Bluesky. In the second part of the takeover (published tomorrow), AHRC postdoctoral researcher Olivia Glaze comments on our co-creation of The Burnout Booklet: A Health Resource for Patients and Practitioners (Murphy and Glaze 2025b) and explains the relevance of the project’s societal impact for languages-based policy work in the medical humanities. Subsequent takeover pieces this week will emphasise the value and significance of Hispanic Studies research in the wider field, through contributions by Nicolás Fernández-Medina and Rocío Rødtjer on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. The final piece, by Charles Forsdick, will reflect on the Reading Bodies project’s multilingual foundations and its implications for wider reach and impact in the field.
About the author
Katharine Murphy is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, University of Exeter. She has published widely on interdisciplinary approaches to Spanish Modernism, gender, and comparative literary studies, and is the author of Bodies of Disorder: Gender and Degeneration in Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez (Legenda, 2017) and Re-reading Pío Baroja and English Literature (Peter Lang, 2004). Her new book Images of Illness in Spanish Fiction: Sick Literature from 1900 to 1955 is in preparation with Boydell and Brewer’s Monografías series. She was awarded a UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship [grant number AH/X01133X/1], 2023–2025, for “Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)”. She is on Bluesky @katharinemurphy.bsky.social and LinkedIn: Katharine Murphy.
Acknowledgements
This project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/X01133X/1], 2023–2025. I would like to thank Jordan McCullough, series editor, for facilitating the Reading Bodies takeover of The Polyphony.
References
Baroja, Pío. [1904] 2010. Mala hierba. Cátedra.
Baroja, Pío. 1923. Weeds. Translated by Isaac Goldberg. Alfred A. Knopf.
Bauer, Mark S. [2008] 2023. “A. Mary F. Robinson (1857–1944).” In A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction, edited by Mark S. Bauer, 182. Online Edition. Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195336405.003.0060.
Berthoud, Ella, and Susan Elderkin. 2013. The Novel Cure: An A–Z of Literary Remedies. Canongate.
Carney, James, and Cole Robertson. 2022. “Five studies evaluating the impact on mental health and mood of recalling, reading, and discussing fiction.” PLoS One 17 (4): e0266323. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266323.
Cleghorn, Elinor. 2021. Unwell Women: A Journey through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Criado Perez, Caroline. 2020. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Vintage.
Davis, Lennard J. 2008. Obsession: A History. University of Chicago Press.
Flint, Sally, and Katharine Murphy (eds). 2024. Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience. University of Exeter, with Riptide Journal.
Jackson, Gabrielle. 2019. Pain and Prejudice: A Call to Arms for Women and their Bodies. Piatkus.
McGregor, Alyson J. 2021. Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It. Quercus Publishing.
Murphy, Katharine. 2025. “Reading neurasthenia: Nervous exhaustion and its afterlives in Pío Baroja’s El árbol de la ciencia (1911).” Journal of Romance Studies 25 (3): 419–41. https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2025.21.
Murphy, Katharine, and Olivia Glaze (eds). 2025a. “Reading bodies: Narrating illness in European literatures and cultures (1870s to 1960s and beyond).” Journal of Romance Studies 25 (3): 293–530. https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/jrs/25/3.
Murphy, Katharine, and Olivia Glaze. 2025b. The Burnout Booklet: A Health Resource for Patients and Practitioners. University of Exeter. https://readingbodies.exeter.ac.uk/publications/burnoutbooklet.
Murphy, Katharine. 2024. “Reading Bodies in European Literatures and Cultures.” The Polyphony, February 20, 2024. https://thepolyphony.org/2024/02/20/reading-bodies.
Navarro, Elvira. 2014. La trabajadora. Literatura Random House.
Navarro, Elvira. 2017. A Working Woman. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Two Lines Press.
Schaffner, Anna Katharina. 2016. Exhaustion: A History. Columbia University Press.
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World Health Organization. 2019. “Burn-out an ‘occupational phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases.” WHO, May 28, 2019. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases.
Zimmer, Katya. 2025. “‘It opened up something in me’: Why people are turning to bibliotherapy.” BBC Future, June 17, 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250616-how-bibliotherapy-can-both-help-and-harm-your-mental-health.
