David B. Morris is a writer and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Eros and Illness lends authority and vision to the very private experiences of personal pain and illness. As his wife Ruth succumbs to an aggressive early form of dementia, David Morris ‘corrects’ what he thinks he knows about pain and suffering with his own anguish. From this personal experience emerges the daring formulation of medical eros. What Morris is trying for is almost impossible, but he pulls it off. He is trying to enter illness carrying its presumed antithesis. He proposes that some valuable things are possible within the experience of serious illness, that one can undergo states of profound quest, of abandon, of all that is not ordinary, constricted life. Only a scholar of Morris’s stature who has had to suffer his battering losses would be able to propose such a profound challenge to the world of medicine.

David B. Morris is a writer and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Eros and Illness lends authority and vision to the very private experiences of personal pain and illness. As his wife Ruth succumbs to an aggressive early form of dementia, David Morris ‘corrects’ what he thinks he knows about pain and suffering with his own anguish. From this personal experience emerges the daring formulation of medical eros. What Morris is trying for is almost impossible, but he pulls it off. He is trying to enter illness carrying its presumed antithesis. He proposes that some valuable things are possible within the experience of serious illness, that one can undergo states of profound quest, of abandon, of all that is not ordinary, constricted life. Only a scholar of Morris’s stature who has had to suffer his battering losses would be able to propose such a profound challenge to the world of medicine.

David B. Morris is a writer and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Eros and Illness lends authority and vision to the very private experiences of personal pain and illness. As his wife Ruth succumbs to an aggressive early form of dementia, David Morris ‘corrects’ what he thinks he knows about pain and suffering with his own anguish. From this personal experience emerges the daring formulation of medical eros. What Morris is trying for is almost impossible, but he pulls it off. He is trying to enter illness carrying its presumed antithesis. He proposes that some valuable things are possible within the experience of serious illness, that one can undergo states of profound quest, of abandon, of all that is not ordinary, constricted life. Only a scholar of Morris’s stature who has had to suffer his battering losses would be able to propose such a profound challenge to the world of medicine.