When Jody McAuliffe, chair of theater studies and professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies, was 20, her father died in a psychiatric ward, having suffered from dementia, hallucinations and a debilitating cocktail of other presumed neurological diseases. He first experienced these signs of mental illness following a failed surgery to correct a condition known as torticollis, which is characterized by an involuntary contraction of the neck muscles. McAuliffe’s new book “The Mythical Bill: A Neurological Memoir,” published last month, pulls from her father’s diary entries, letters, interviews and her own research to explore the history of medical treatment, as well as into McAuliffe’s own journey to understand what had happened to her father.
The Chronicle’s Shangnon Fei spoke with McAuliffe about her inspiration for the project, the interdisciplinary approach she took to it and the role of storytelling in good medicine. McAuliffe will read from the book Tuesday at 4:30 in 109 Page.
The Chronicle: What made you want to write “The Mythical Bill”?
Jody McAuliffe: It started with the question, “What was really wrong with my father?” The circumstances of his death were mysterious, so not only did I want to know what happened to him in World War II, but also what happened to him as a result of that, what exactly was his illness…. I’d become something of an armchair neurologist over the years and brain disease just became one of my major interests, and I think that was partly motivated by my wondering what was really the matter with him. I didn’t know anything beyond the fact that he had torticollis, and I knew he’d had an unsuccessful surgery, so I wrote the book because I wanted to really investigate the mystery.
Also, when I first came to Duke in 2008, I wrote a short story about my father called “Standing On End,” which was the first short story I’d ever written, and that story was the sketch of what ultimately became the book. The other thing I wanted to investigate was the illness itself—my mother passed away in 2005, and all my father’s siblings had passed away, and this wasn’t the sort of book I’d want to write while they were alive, because it would be too painful for them. And one of the fantastic things about the internet was that I could research all about these neurological disorders like torticollis, so I was able to read all of this fascinating stuff about the history of neurological illnesses and of war trauma. And then I realized, “Ok, I can do this.” I didn’t want to write a book that was purely memoir. I also wanted to write a book that was a study of attitudes toward these illnesses, and a history of an illness that no one really knew the cause of.
TC: This book combines elements of memoir and history and sociology and medicine. Do you think this mix would be appealing to Duke students, whether they be pre-med or otherwise?
JM: I would hope so! Because it’s a study of how illness affects a family, but it’s also a kind of sociocultural history of someone who grew up in the 50’s, and I’d hope that anyone who was interested in the history of medicine, and the way that attitudes toward disease affect choices of treatment, would be interested in this. And the interesting thing is that now we know how torticollis functions, although we still don’t know what causes it, and so now we know that it isn’t anything in the psychological makeup of the patient that causes it. So now there’s an additional aspect of how inextricable the mind is from the body.
The other weird thing that I discovered is that my father had studied playwriting in graduate school, which I didn’t even know. So this might be interesting to Duke students. When we try to choose what we’re going to do, it usually breaks down to one of two things: we do the opposite of what our parents do, or we do the same. And I didn’t realize just how much my father’s aspiration was functioning through me, because he’d never told me he was interested in playwriting. So that was kind of shocking.
Another thing that was interesting to me was the extent to which we are influenced by our parents’ physicality, how much we learn from them and imitate them in a way we’re not even conscious of, it’s just a matter of very active mirror neurons. So in a way I wanted to understand my father’s influence on me as well. People always ask me, “So how long have you been writing this book?” And my brother told me, “I think you’ve been writing this book your whole life.”
TC: Do you think there is a special role for medicine in literature, or literature in medicine?
JM: I do. I think there is a special role of storytelling in medicine, especially in diagnosis. I also believe very strongly that whatever is wrong with the mind can be traced back to a bodily cause—no disease is off the table.
I had an opportunity in Northwestern to do their six-year medical program, and I was initially repulsed by it. But now I think that if I could have a second life, I would have been a doctor, because in a funny way theater and medicine are very related because they’re both about the theory of people and what makes them tick. Maybe not necessarily about illness, although a lot of people in plays have something wrong with them. But I think I would have pursued neurology in particular if I had gone down that path in life.
I do think storytelling is really important to medicine. I think there’s a new emphasis on that sort of thing in teaching medicine. Because if you’re going to find out what makes someone tick, you have to really listen to them—you can’t deal with things drily anymore.
TC: Do you think that doctors not taking a more humanist approach was one of the failures of medicine back when the events of your book were taking place?
JM: One of the weird things I read in my father’s diary was that the neurologist had told my father that his illness could be cured by taking more responsibility for his life, something that seems absurd to me now. Because, at the time, they didn’t know that the disease had to do with a malfunction in the basal ganglia. So I don’t know what to call that besides a psychologizing of his symptoms, you know, people saying, “You have this problem because you won’t take responsibility.” When actually, that isn’t true. It’s more complicated than that.
And there’s a lot of brain stuff we still don’t know, but we do know this about torticollis now. But back in the ’20s, when people still had these attitudes that people with mental illnesses were weak, they didn’t know that weakness isn’t gonna cause your nervous system to start malfunctioning. The interesting thing about medicine to me is that it’s never just one thing.
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