Narratives of illness and Healing: Medical Humanities Perspectives in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway

Abstract

This paper examines, via the example of Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the medical humanities approach. In addition to the novel's criticisms, the history of medical approaches to trauma, illness, and their treatments is elucidated. However, it is the stream of consciousness approach via the example of Mrs. Dalloway that clearly indicates the subjective experience of mental illness, especially with regard to the example of Septimus Warren Smith that is presented. So, shell shock is given as a first explanation, but rather, as recognized today, a condition attendant to ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’. However, it is the inadequacies of modern psychiatry as presented by Sir Will Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes that clearly present a criticism of medical approaches to mental health, as opposed to social adaptability. At the same time, Wolf explores the conditions of social, as opposed to simply emotional, Vulnerability as presented via the example of Clarissa Dalloway, as opposed to simply emotional, to suggest that health is gender-specific. However, with the sufferance of skin decease, he could no longer take any part in public affairs. Therefore, presenting London itself as an interdependent Organism, Woolf’s narrative lucidly depicts how the individual health is inseparable from broader social, political, and cultural environments. Finally, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ stands out as an outstanding representative of a literary narrative, which is allowed to press those aspects of illness and healing that clinical discourse cannot fully capture and makes it a foundational text for the Medical humanities.