In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Through records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these "scenes of loss" and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure-the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die.