Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric

This chapter charts developments in anatomy in the wake of the French Revolution, and shows how Romantic lyrics model a reading practice informed by anatomical medicine. Surgical tropes from the advances in morbid anatomy, for example, inform William Wordsworth’s most important poems. Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s mind” and the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth’s model of interpretation, the critic Francis Jeffrey and the poet John Keats developed a practice of dissective reading, an influential protocol that crossed between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. Dissective reading anticipates symptomatic close reading through a segmentation of surface and underlying structures, and invokes dismemberment as a tool for converting critical reading into authorial auto-exegesis. Examples drawn from Wordsworth and Keats reveal how Romantic lyrics offer up the poet’s own body as the subject of surgical (and critical) analysis, treating critical readings as diagnoses of the poets themselves.

‘Written of by novelists’: scripting and managing emotions in 19th-century medical manuscripts

Literary and medical historical scholars have long explored the work of physician–writers and the cross-pollination of literature and medicine. However, few scholars have considered how these interactions have shaped medical manuscripts and the echoes they contain of the emotional contours of the medical encounter. This essay uses the papers of Southern physician Andrew Bowles Holder (1860–1896) to explore how the emotions of the physician were managed at the bedside and in the aftermath of medical encounters through recourse to literary thinking. Holder, like many 19th-century physicians, was an avid reader with an interest in literary endeavours, and his manuscripts reveal the influences of literature on his work as a physician. This article frames the bedside as a theatre of emotions, in which Holder’s performance and management of his emotions was key to his professional identity. His literary interests thus provided him with two tools: first, literature provided him with models for how to respond to and record different kinds of medical encounters, particularly deaths, near-death experiences and childbirth; second, his mode of keeping these records, which included the production of poetry as well as medical prose, served as a technology of coping, further allowing him to manage his emotions by exorcising them on the page.

Cervantes and Madness

Cervantes experimented with different writing styles and did not recycle personality traits amongst his characters, including those considered mad. Unlike the stereotype of the madman that often figured in early modern theatre, no Cervantine character is consistently mad throughout the entire work in which he or she appears. Characters become mad, fluctuate in degrees of mental imbalance, may temporarily express manic rage, and usually regain sanity at some point in the text. Cervantes allows his characters to evolve beyond their character types, and this includes for some of them transitioning through different degrees of insanity. This chapter aims to serve as a guide for those interested in reviewing the theme of madness in Cervantine literature, along with possible sources of influence contemporary to Cervantes in literature and medicine. It also explores twentieth and twenty-first century research focusing on madness in Don Quixote as well as in Cervantes’s other literary creations.

Freedom

This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making a readerly/writerly diagnosis. As literary movements such as metafiction expose the fallacies and limitations of literary realism, metagnosis constructively exposes the representational practices of biomedicine. The confluence of metagnosis and metareferentiality is explored in the work of contemporary comedian Hannah Gadsby. In addition, the implications of metagnosis are shown to extend beyond the context of health and medicine to revelations concerning identity (e.g., Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance) and to the cultural discourse of identity writ large (e.g., Appiah, Haider, Zadie Smith). Understanding metagnosis as a revelation effecting a change in knowledge—and employing our blindsight to address the apparent binaries structuring our understanding—is integral to our understanding of ourselves and of identity itself as we move into an increasingly dynamic future.

Literature and Medicine: Clinical Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Contemporary Iranian Fictions

Background: Some studies indicated that the study of stories in which physical or mental illnesses are described helps to better understand the patient and his/her sickness; but unfortunately, this approach is neglected in the Persian literature. Paying attention to this issue can increase the attractiveness of studying such literary works for the Iranian and non-Iranian audience and can grant new sights to readers, as well. Objectives: This research is conducted to describe and explain the symptoms of the PTSD in the characters of modern Persian fiction, based on the clinical symptoms. Methods: This is qualitative research. Seven characters from the seven stories were selected purposefully to fit the researcher’s goals. Then, they were analyzed according to the DSM-5 criteria. Results: The results indicated that the selected stories represent individuals with PTSD consistent with the clinical criteria for the diagnostic of the disorder. In these stories, the authors, in addition to describing clinical symptoms, have considered inheritance, gender, and cultural factors to create characters in accordance with the specifications of the people who have been damaged in the real world. Conclusions: Reading these stories can be useful due to applying descriptions based on clinical criteria for the diagnosis of this disorder (PTSD), and thanks to the use of literary language in representing the victim’s inner and spiritual status, are useful in creating an engagement resulting from a proper understanding of the person who is suffering from such disorder.

Deconstruction of Binaries and Role Reversal in Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air

Physicians’ stories of their illness attempt to bridge the divide between a professional doctor and a patient’s narrative by combining both the versions. This research paper undertakes a narratological analysis of latest illness narrative written by a physician-turned-patient Paul Kalanithi in his When Breath Becomes Air. The present study also finds out the role reversal happening between a clinician, patient and writer. It further aims to analyze Paul Kalanithi’s autobiographical memoir as a literary narrative of his last stage fatal lung cancer. The paper highlights the link between literature and the medical world and in this way generates a better understanding of the present interdisciplinary relation of both the disciplines i.e. literature and medicine. This research is qualitative and descriptive while textual analysis has been used as a research method. This study ends with the findings and recommendations for further research.

"Balada dos maus pensamentos" e outros poemas

This piece of writing answers creatively to the question of how literature and medicine can be interrelated. Combining medical practice and poetry writing, the selected poems address the interruption of life through poetry, on the one hand, and the contamination of poetry by death, illness, pain and aging, on the other.