Episode 48: Jim Phelan & Catherine Belling — Susan Onthank Mates’s “Laundry”

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Catherine Belling discuss “Laundry” by Susan Onthank Mates, originally published in Mates’s 1994 collection, The Good Doctor. Catherine Belling is Associate Professor of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Belling teaches in the MA program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. She directs the medical students, medical humanities seminars, and teaches in the four-year Clinical Ethics Curriculum and Bioethics Graduate Scholars Program. Belling is a two time winner of prizes from the Society for Literature Science and the Arts. Her 2010 essay in Narrative, “Narrating Oncogenesis,” won the Schachterle Prize for Best Essay by an Untenured Scholar, and her 2012 book, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria, won the 2013 Kendrick Book Prize. Belling served as editor-in-chief of Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018. Her current book project has the working title, Morbid and Disturbing: Medicine and Horror and Horror in Medicine.