Illness, Literature, and Care

At the heart of Illness, Literature, and Care is a view of care as attunement, a dynamic process of fragile rapport. Care in this mode does not abandon tradition and expertise, the collection of skills and practices built up over time. Instead, it holds that expertise lightly in the face of each new encounter, rising to the possibilities of the present moment rather than deploying a preformed response. Robert Leigh Davis shows how the open character of attunement situates care in spontaneous interactions, often with strangers, where abstract principles are less valuable than meeting people on their own terms, listening to them, being in sync with them—and then, allowing that meeting to guide the choices that follow. Davis develops this idea by examining scenes of care in Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Simone Weil, Flannery O’Connor, Nancy Mairs, Cortney Davis, graphic medicine, and the literature of nursing. Davis shows that good care is not an abstract principle one might work out in universal terms, but an evolving set of practices tuned to the demands of a concrete occasion: a care moment.