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@article{210676,
        author = {Dr Samsonraj C and Dr Shyilla Juliet D and Dr Elakiya V},
        title = {Beyond the Clinical Gaze: Death, Care, and Physician Identity in Anna DeForest’s Our Long Marvelous Dying},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {6},
        pages = {1781-1786},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=210676},
        abstract = {Medicine is conventionally narrated as a science of diagnosis and cure, yet those who practice it spend much of their working lives in the presence of suffering, mortality and loss that no treatment can reverse. This paper reads Anna DeForest’s novel Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) as a literary record of the physician’s experience in the space between life and death. The novel follows an unnamed narrator, a physician undertaking a fellowship in palliative care during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, as she cares for dying patients and their families while confronting the death of her long-estranged father and the strains of her own marriage and family life. Drawing on medical humanities, narrative medicine, the sociology of death and dying, and theories of liminality and care ethics, the paper argues that the novel presents the hospital as a liminal space in which life and death coexist; portrays the physician as a vulnerable subject who bears emotional and moral burdens rather than a detached technical expert; locates healing in presence, listening and honest communication when cure is no longer possible; and uses an auto fictional, fragmentary and lyrical form as an ethical response to the limits of clinical language. The paper concludes that the novel enlarges the aims of medicine from curing disease to accompanying persons through suffering with dignity, and that its insights are relevant to medical education and to the care of caregivers after the pandemic.},
        keywords = {Death, Dying, Medical humanities, Narrative medicine, Palliative care, and Physician experience.},
        month = {November},
        }