1st Edition
Art of Illness Malingering and Inventing Health Conditions
There is a long history of inventing illness, such as pretending to be sick for attention or accusing others of being ill. This volume explores the art of illness, and the deceptions and truths around health and bodies, from a multiplicity of angles from antiquity to the present.
The chapters, which are based on primary-source evidence ranging from antiquity to the late twentieth century, are divided into three sections. The first part explores how the idea of faking illness was understood and conceptualized across multiple fields, locations, and time periods. The second part uses case studies to emphasize the human element of those at the center of these narratives and how their behavior was shaped by societal attitudes. The third part investigates the development of regulations and laws governing malingering and malingerers. Altogether, they paint a picture of humans doing human actions—cheating, lying, stealing, but also hiding, surviving, working.
This book’s careful, accessible scholarship is a valuable resource for academics, scientists, and the sophisticated undergraduate audience interested in malingering narratives throughout history.
Foreword
Walton O. Schalick, III
Introduction: The Bioethics of Malingering, Misrepresentation of Health, and Forensics of Illness
Wendy J. Turner
Part 1: Conceptualizing Malingering
1. Malingering in Ancient Greece and Rome
Lisa LeBlanc
2. Form, Fraud, and Performance in Middle English Medical Satire
Chelsea Silva
3. Pathologising Ecstatic Dance: Reflections on Medieval Dansomania and the Love Parade in Berlin, 1996
Irina Metzler
4. Philosophical Paradoxes of Factitious Disorders
Herb Leventer
Part 2: Historic Cases of Malingering
5. ‘Because she pretended to be pregnant and was not’: Fake Royal Pregnancies in Medieval Scotland
Emma Trivett
6. Feigning Madness: The Case of William Hawkyns, 1552 London
Wendy J. Turner
7. "A decietfull gypsay [sic]": Malingering, Performance and Princess Sophia’s "Fitts"
Carolyn A. Day
Part 3: Regulations and Laws Against Malingering
8. Faking It: Thirteenth Century Bolognese Responses to Feigning Leprosy
Courtney A. Krolikoski
9. Expertis medicis videatur: Legal Medical Expertise in the Apostolic Chancery’s Assessment of Personal Injury Damages During the Avignon Period (1309–1378)
Ninon Dubourg
10. Compensatory Damages and the Construction of Disability in Prenatal Torts
Luke I. Haqq
Afterword
Eliza Buhrer
Biography
Wendy J. Turner is Professor of History in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy at Augusta University, where she also holds affiliate professorships in the Center for Bioethics and Health Policy in the Institute for Public and Preventative Health and The Graduate School.
