Relations between the poisonous social system of slavery and the individual afflicted body lie at the heart of Harriet Jacobs's narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Throughout, Jacobs depicts incidents of illness, physical and moral, personal and social. In its story of individual suffering, Jacobs's text can be fruitfully identified as an illness narrative. As defined by physician Arthur Kleinman, an illness narrative is “a story the patient tells, and significant others retell, to give coherence to the distinctive events and long-term course of suffering. The plot lines, core metaphors, and rhetorical devices that structure the illness narrative are drawn from cultural and personal models for arranging experiences in meaningful ways.” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, however, tells not only of a “long-term course of suffering” personal and familial, but of an entire culture disordered and polluted. These several levels of illness are both interactive and made synonymous, each caused by a destructive order that affects both the individual and social constitution. As illness forms a core of meaning in Incidents, bodily relations of authority and powerlessness are played out in the relation of physician with patient, which is also, in Jacobs's text, the relation of master with slave.

Jacobs's illness narrative draws on the rich variety of nineteenth-century discourse, from the stern language of Garrisonian resistance to the appeals of sentimental sisterhood.