‘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.

Inexhaustible Source of Knowledge

Azerbaijan people have rich and ancient cultural traditions and have contri­buted extensively to the world brilliant masterpieces of artistic, philosophical and scientific thought. This cultural heritage is known not only in Azerbaijan, but also all over the world. Since antiquity, there were large libraries in Azerbaijan. The Institute of manuscripts of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences has a collection of 453 medical manuscripts, dating from the IX century. Seventy three manuscripts were written in Arabic, sixty ones – in Turkic (Azeri and Ottoman Turkish) and three thousand twenty ones - in Persian languages. In 29 July 2005 UNESCO officially included three medieval medical manuscripts from the Institute of Manuscripts of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences into the register of the Memory of the World Program which includes the most unique and irreplaceable written monuments of the humankind. The Certificate confirming this decision was presented to the Institute of Manuscripts by Dr. Matsuura, the head of UNESCO. One of them oldest copies of the second volume of “Canon of Medicine” (1030) by Ibn Sina, know in the West as Avicenna (980-1037). Second book is “Zakhira-I Nizamshahi” was written in the XIII century by the famous Central Asian author Zeynaddin Ibn Abu Ibrahim Jurjani. The manuscripts are unique and not found in other manuscripts deposits in the world. The third book is “al-Maqalatun Salasun” by Abulkasim Zakhravı. One of the rarest and most ancient manuscripts of this book in the World. Ancient manuscripts, being a unique invention of mankind, had an impact on the entire history in general and on medicine in particular.

Medicine in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, c.1350–c.1750

Between c.1350 and c.1750 a small group of professional hereditary physicians served the Gaelic communities of Ireland and Scotland. Over fifty medical kindreds provided advice regarding health maintenance and treatment with herbs and surgery. Their medical knowledge was derived from Gaelic translations of medieval European Latin medical texts grounded in the classical works of Hippocrates and Galen, and the Arab world. Students studied in medical schools where they copied and compiled medical texts in Irish, some for use as handbooks. Over 100 texts are extant. Political upheaval and scientific advances led to the eclipse of this medical world. Through examination of the Gaelic medical manuscripts and other sources this article provides an assessment of medicine in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries.