Abstract: The mainstream medical humanities puts emphasis on the illness narrative as a tool in diagnosis and medical education, thereby defining it as the linear narrative in autobiography and other related genres. Critical medical humanities, which is aimed at breaking through linear narrative and social critique, is the developmental trend of traditional medical humanities. Katherine Anne Porter’s autobiographical novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, represents the chaotic experience of illness that is hard to document by nonfictional illness narrative through such modernist techniques as stream of consciousness, fragmentation of subject, and non-referentiality of language, hence, in a sense, compensating the cultural absence in the wake of the Great Pandemic of 1918 due to the obliteration of the First World War and the difficulty in handling the representation of the illness. By incorporating this novella into the illness narrative genre, we may adopt the approach of Disability Studies in literary criticism to explore the nature of social stigmatization of illness. Breaking the conceptual boundaries between illness and disability will not only offer us a full understanding of the relationship between illness, disability, body and society, but also help us cultivate more ideas about practicing critical medical humanities.

Key words: Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Illness Narrative, the Great Pandemic of 1918, stigmatization