Trauma, memory and resilience: A psycho-physical reading of disease in robin cook’s fever

Diseases, as contingent as they appear, impact on the sufferer both physical and psychological trauma. Robin Cook’s Fever recreates the physical and psychological dimensions of disease on the patient and the patients’ relative. In the main, while literary scholarship on literature and medicine have examined illness from the point of view of the sufferer, not much have focused on the relative of the sick who bears most of the physical and psychological burden. This study, therefore, examines Robin Cook’s Fever through Trauma theoretical critical lens as this provides a scaffold for a valid depiction of the claims that disease constitutes trauma and trauma can be stored in memory. The engagement of a text by a renowned physician writer as Robin Cook seeks to highlight the complex relations that exist when a child is diagnosed of a deadly disease as cancer especially when the mother dies of the same disease. The study divulges that not all traumas are weakening. Trauma can be recuperative even when the idioms of distress are greatly perturbing. Resilience can change a life-threatening situation. The study concludes by focusing attention on the role of traumatic memory and how this memory can trigger an inner strength to turn trauma around.