Creating Romantic Obsession: Scorpions in the Mind (2025)

A tale of two cities: The influence of literature on medicine

Heart, Vessels and Transplantation Journal, 2020

The following piece is a reflection concerning the interplay between the art of writing and the art of medicine. We are exploring the similarities and disparities of the field with a focus on doctors-medical students and fiction authors/poets. We are currently medical students and we identify as poets and fiction authors since our high school years and hence we are trying to point out our perspective. In the end we give some hints about the role that literature can play in modern medicine.

The Holistic Literary Character: The Body And The Soul The Holistic Medicine In Literature

2018

ABSTRACT: Intimacy in fiction is an aesthetical, symbolical and emotional choice. Medicine and novel writing seem to prolong the disease nature has given to mankind. Some writers' propensity for structural themes and motifs from pathology can be considered both a professional and a somatic diagnosis predisposition. Life as a fate leading to death was a general idea at the end of the 19th century. To suddenly utter, that the soul is the body could have destabilised humanistic sciences, and it meant the decentralisation of literary character, the shift of narrative techniques, the conversion of psychology to physiological analysis emphasising the authenticity of sensation. Hortensia Papadat Bengescu's characters are so fleshless, that it's easy to see their soul. Illness is their only connection to the world. Each character tragically aspires to a common life, refused to all of them by their psychological or physiological condition. KEY WORDS: somatic diagnosis, intimacy, ...

Science and Literature: Imagination, Medicine and Space

Science and Literature: Imagination, Medicine and Space, 2021

This volume, alongside its sister volume “Poetry and Prose”, brings together fourteen essays from the vibrant field of Science and Literature. Each of the two volumes has been structured around specific themes that link its papers. The themes here are Imagination, Medicine and Space. Imagination, is understood not only as an analytical category on its own right, but also as a way forward for the field as a whole. The articles contained in the section describe possible contours and directions of future research. Medicine is a tragically relevant topic in these pandemic times, but that it would become such a notorious subject would have come as a surprise four years ago, when the first papers included in this second section were first presented. The third and concluding section is Space, appearing not only as a geographical denomination, but also as an imaginary topos and as the site of a specific activity. Collectively, these essays represent a range of scholars working in periods from the 18th century to the 20th, in spaces as far apart as Greece, Uruguay, Australia and Trinidad and in topics ranging from quantum physics to the plague. To do so, they bring to bear an equally varied set of methodologies and theoretical apparatus from literary studies, epistemology, philosophy of technology, history of science and psychoanalysis. The range of essays collected here also presents a host of narrative styles and modes of academic expression. The contributors to these two volumes hail not only from academia, but are also artists, independent scholars and passionate enthusiasts of local history and art. This way, the volume brings to the fore the interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, or even at times, a-disciplinarity of Science and Literature studies.

Literature and medicine: physician-writers

The medical humanities: literature and medicine

Clinical Medicine, 2010

The medical humanities attempt to emphasise the subjective experience of patients within the objective and scientific world of medicine. This article argues that the goal of medical humanities can be furthered by literature. Autobiographical accounts are used to illustrate the various ways in which literature can influence and enrich medical practice.

Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine: The State of the Art by Alan Bleakley

Literature and Medicine, 2021

Edgar Allan Poe, MD: Medical Fiction and the Birth of Modern Medicine

Edgar Allan Poe’s knowledge gathered from mesmerists and pseudoscientists of his time finds a reflection in his short stories in the form of organic decomposition and electrical theories. One can also observe in Poe’s texts an attempt to satirize, criticize and leave record of his ambitious interest in the nineteenth-century medicine and medical practices. America was witnessing the rise of a scientific era where most of the scientific theories as known today were being developed. On the other hand, America was under the influence of sensationalism: pseudoscience and the pseudoscientific theories, which were in the borders of hoax and truth. The growing popularity of scientific sensationalism by physics in the American prewar period, professional medical publications, treaties such as Klecksographien by Justinus Kerner (which was source of inspiration, also, to the well-known Hermann Rorschach), magazines, English periodicals of the 1830s and theatre, influenced Poe and his creations significantly. This is reflected in some of Poe’s stories: dyspnea, anxiety, paroxysm, coma, suspended animation, use of prosthetics, bio-augmentation, bio-modification and epilepsia in “Loss of Breath;” monomania, catatonia, catalepsia, narcolepsia and inbreed in “Eleanora” and “The Fall of the House of Usher;” cataplexy in “Berenice;” miasmatic theories, Spanish influenza, and yellow fever in “The Masque of the Read Death;” hallucinogens, hypnotics, sedatives and ancient anesthesia in “The Man that was Used Up,” proboscis and cyclopia in “Bon-Bon;” analgesia in “The Business Man;” and tuberculosis in “Ligeia.” This article will delve deeper in the medical aspect of these scientific narrations in Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Keywords: pseudoscience, Edgar Allan Poe, nineteenth-century, literature, medicine

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Perspectives in Medical Humanities publishes peer reviewed scholarship produced or reviewed under the auspices of the University of California Medical Humanities Consortium, a multi-campus collaborative of faculty, students, and trainees in the humanities, medicine, and health sciences. Our series invites scholars from the humanities and health care professions to share narratives and analysis on health, healing, and the contexts of our beliefs and practices that impact biomedical inquiry.

Understanding Convergence: Comprehending Medical Humanities as a Literary Genre

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Discourses concerned with human health and well-being are emerging in the domain of literary studies. The field is generally termed as 'Medical Humanities'. Medical Humanities is an interesting field of study which takes into consideration the humanities, social sciences, art, literature, creative writing, music, philosophy, etc. which opens up a research areas to study and understand ideas related to medical science. Literature and medical science is an interesting branch of study which not only incorporates the ideas of medical science in literature but also promotes many interdisciplinary genres. This field is emerging as a new genre in literature which is now considered to be a seminal discourse. Rather than merely speaking about the notions of disease and illness with a medical jargon, Medical Humanities takes within its ambit a wider socio-cultural perspective on health and disease, moral compass of the patient-doctor relationship and experiences thereby making the readers aware of the complexities, and promoting empathy in the mind of readers. This approach put forward by Medical Humanities bolsters the reader's ability to understand the plight of people undergoing the crisis. Most importantly, it enables the reader to suspend his notion of reality and enter into the reality of other characters, thereby promoting moral sensibilities. The main objective of this paper is to understand how medical science and literature confluence together to form a hybrid genre.

« The Healing Power of Words : Medicine as Literature in Bernard Mandeville’s Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases »in Sophie Vasset (éd.) Medicine and Narration in the XVIIIth Century (Oxford, SVEC, 2013), pp. 161-181.

In the prefatory note to his definitive edition of the Fable of the bees, 1 Frederick Kaye claimed that he had 'not passed these last years in Mandeville's company without an ever-deepening certainty of his literary greatness', leaving future generations of scholars the opportunity to expound on this aspect of Mandeville's work. Notwithstanding the intricate composition of the Fable of the bees itself, published in three successive phases and featuring a long poem, a set of philosophical remarks and a dialogue, the best example of the literary qualities mentioned by Kaye is certainly -and perhaps surprisingly -Mandeville's Treatise of the hypochondriack and hysterick diseases, the only medical work ever written in English by the Dutch physician. When, in 1711, the first version of what was then entitled A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions appeared, 2 Bernard Mandeville had already published a translation of La Fontaine (Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine), Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants: a burlesque poem in imitation of the comical Mons. Scarron (1704), The Grumbling hive -the first version of the text which was reissued in 1714 with a set of philosophical remarks as The Fable of the bees -and The Virgin unmask'd, a dialogue upon love and marriage between an old woman and her niece. 3 The initial version of the Treatise was reprinted in 161 1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the bees, ed. Frederick B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford, 1924). 2. B. Mandeville, A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions, vulgarly call'd the hypo in men and vapours in women, in which the symptoms, causes, and cure of those diseases are set forth after a method entirely new, the whole interspers'd, with instructive discourses on the real art of physic itself, and entertaining remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries, very useful to all, that have the misfortune to stand in need of either, in three dialogues (London, Dryden Leach, 1711). 3. Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine (London, 1703) followed by an enlarged version (AEsop dress'd, London, R. Wellington, 1704), this edition contains Mandeville's translation of La Fontaine's 'Les membres et l'estomac', which heralds the passages on the supremacy of digestion included in the Treatise and hints at the body as a metaphor of government used in The Fable of the bees (see vol.1, p.3). Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants (London, J. Pero, 1704); The Grumbling hive, or Knaves turn'd honest (London, S. Ballard, 1705); The Virgin unmask'd (London, J. Morphew, 1709). 1715 with no changes by the same publisher. 4 Fifteen years later, a second edition 'corrected and enlarged by the author' was printed; Mandeville altered the title, added about a hundred new pages and took out certain parts. 5 With the Treatise, Mandeville returned to medical literature, which he had somewhat neglected since his university years in Leyden, where he matriculated in philosophy in 1685 and graduated in 1691 with a doctoral degree in medicine. Indeed, apart from this larger work, his only forays into medical writing had hitherto been limited to his production as a student. He wrote his inaugural thesis in 1685 (Bernardi à Mandeville de medicina oratio scholastica), followed by another philosophical dissertation on animal functions in 1689 (Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus). Finally, in 1691, he defended his medical thesis on the subject of digestion (Disputatio medica inauguralis de chylosi vitiata) and substantial portions of this text were later incorporated in the Treatise.