Marked on the Body:
Gretchen Case explores the stories we tell about scars

Gretchen Case’s research – which focuses on scars treated by doctors or created through medical procedures – often provokes some surprised reactions.

“The first thing people always say is: ‘You’re researching scars?” Case laughs. “But the responses are amazing. Sometimes, people lift their shirts to show and let me touch their scars. Everybody has a scar they want to talk about.”

John #2 © Amie Potsic, 2000

Case, a PhD candidate in performance studies, says that people assign very different meanings to scars. While a patient may see a scar as a sign of having survived an ordeal, a doctor may look at a scar as a sign of an artfully performed surgery.

“I’m most interested in the stories we create around scars, how someone like a doctor looks at scars as opposed to the way someone who lives with very visible scarring would,” says Case. “There is a very human need to make narratives around scars.”

Case –who describes her work as a cross-disciplinary mixture of performance and cultural studies, medicine, anthropology and literature – notes that when someone talks about a scar, they are in essence giving a performance that can be analyzed.

For her dissertation, Case – currently a Townsend Center Fellow – has interviewed people with scars as well as a variety of medical caregivers, including surgeons, dermatologists and physical therapists.

One story she describes as particularly powerful is that of a Berkeley woman who had a mastectomy. The woman’s friend and workout partner would avert her eyes when they changed in the locker room.

“Her friend showed a kind of revulsion, as if looking at the scar could remind her that it could happen to her, too,’ Case says. “Finally, the cancer survivor made her friend look at the scar. She said: ‘Look at this! It means that I survived!’”

Gretchen Case

Case is also interested in the experiences of people with severe visible scarring. “From the movies and theater, we’re used to thinking of people with scars as the bad guys – Quasimodo and Scarface,” she says. “I interviewed a man in his 50s who has had a large scar on his face for most of his life, and he said children still run away from him when he walks down the street. He has had to live with this.”

Case says that after conducting these interviews, the one conclusion she has reached is that there is “absolutely not just one story of what a scar is. Everybody makes their own meaning, and these meanings can be totally different.”

Rather than define a single narrative of what a scar is, Case says she intends use these different interpretations to help open a dialog between the medical community and patients.

“Doctors see scars in totally different ways,” Case says. “One doctor told me that simply by looking at a scar, he can tell if one of his colleaugues performed the surgery and how well it was done. That is absolutely different than how the patient would see it.”

Patients, in fact, see their scars in ways doctors might not expect. “The stories these people tell can really upset a lot of established ideas about what an ill body is and what a healthy body is,” Case says.

Case’s own interest in scarring began with a personal experience, when her mother became ill with cancer.

“I was watching my mother’s body change through the cancer and watching the different marks that appeared on her body – scars from surgeries, radiation burns and her hair falling out from chemotherapy,” Case says, “and I became interested in what all those marks meant.”  

 

Stella #1 © Amie Potsic, 2000

For Case, research on scarring has been a natural extension of work she did before entering graduate school, when she wrote about scientific and medical research, first for a publishing house and later for the National Cancer Institute. Her master’s thesis looked at the similarities between taking a family history and a medical history.

In the end, she hopes her work will better enable caregivers and patients to better communicate with each other.

“Visiting a doctor doesn’t have to be a scary thing where doctors have knowledge and patients don’t, or where patients end up bashing their doctors,” she says. “Scars are just a starting point, a way of getting a conversation started about how medicine can connect to so many different areas of life.”

-- Doug Merlino