Illness redefines identity. A completely new person must come to terms with a new sense of I/me and navigate the relationship with an altered and hard to grasp present, a hazy past and a fearful hard-to-project future. Illness becomes a new feature of an identity set that is under a constant change. It claims multiple territories and transforms (sometimes radically) their geography, turning them into mazes that must be solved on the unpaved road to the suffering self. My study is rooted in narrative medicine and relies on autobiographic literary writings, ego-prose and testimonials from writers who have faced illness and have taken the dignified journey through the realms of alienation and acceptance, shattered and recomposed selves, fighting and rediscovering themselves. The following pages examine the image of the hospital as seen by the writer and anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu.
Daniela Șilindean (Tue,) studied this question.