Cancer’s Dirty Margins: Minoritized Scholars’ Pathographies

Mary K. Bryson, Bryant Lin, Aamna Rashid and Lauren Edwards introduce a collection of pathographies — autobiographical writing about illness — by humanities scholars living and working with advanced cancer. The editors write from inside this experience: Bryson as a patient with stage IV lung cancer, and Lin as a Stanford physician diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer who built a medical school course around his own case.

The title borrows a surgical term. In oncology, “dirty margins” are cancer cells left beyond the edge of what was removed. The authors extend the phrase to the position of minoritized scholars — racialized, queer, disabled, migrant and Indigenous — whose knowledge is often treated as out of place in clinical and academic institutions. They show how cancer inequities run through screening, diagnosis, treatment and survival, and argue that illness writing, from memoir and autoethnography to visual work and performance, can make that unequal organization of care visible.

A note from the lab

Much of our work concerns illness that cannot be resolved through cure, and the experiences that dominant narratives of survivorship leave out. This issue shows how patients who are also scholars can turn first-person experience into knowledge that challenges how medicine teaches and organizes care. Its focus on minoritized and queer experience in cancer care, and on bringing the patient’s own account into medical education, aligns closely with our work in psycho-oncology and health professions education.