The reliable reconstruction of the historical cultural past and the search for sources for such reconstructions remains important methodological task. This task becomes even more complex, if we deal with the reconstruction of the special spheres of human activity, such as Medicine. Culture science, historical psychology, cultural anthropology pay more and more attention to the analysis of complementary discourse. The author considers that the literary and art texts can prove to be incomparable sources on the value of information. When we study texts on the History of Medicine replacement of historical and cultural context by clinical one inevitably occur. Researcher moves from the field of culture into the space of the professional constructions, which reduce our thoughts about the investigated object. Thus medicine is to be considered not as the separate element of culture, taken out from the context, but as complex cultural configuration. During the late 30–40 years History of Medicine noticeably changed, it left beyond the framework of narrow medical themes and recognized historical and cultural contexts as really actual. The authentic narrations describe actions of concrete persons, and acts themselves cannot be separated from the cultural environment. Many themes of the History of Medicine become clear for us in their literary and artistic reflection and in correlation with the cultural experience. A. Chekhov, L. Tolstoy, M. Bulgakov are authors, for whom medical questions existed in the historical cultural and moral-philosophical context. The hermeneutic method of the considerate of the texts through comments and criticism can be described as the method, close to phenomenological description. Article demonstrates an ability of art text to penetrate directly to the cultural context of epoch. In the center of attention is the novel of Maupassant “Mont-Oriole” and the reconstructions, which can be made on the basis of the text analysis. In the novel in detail the picture of treatment on the waters is restored, that proved by the numerous revealed in the novel topics: the popular methods of treatment; the relation between the doctors and the patients; the types of doctors, medical ethics; fashion in medicine, the current theories of the origin of diseases; the methods of observation and inspection of patients; the role of advertisement in the popularization of health resorts, the first training equipment. The general conclusion that text analysis can be represented as a method of detecting of the general historical cultural component in the vital space of individual is made.
Illness as Metaphor? The Role of Linguistic Categories in the History of Medicine
