El artista modernista y el discurso psiquiátrico: Los Raros de Rubén Darío y la mirada médica finisecular

This article focuses on the relationship between literary discourse and psychiatric discourse in the late 19th century; especially, in what refers to the establishment of knowledge about the abnormal and the configuration of artistic genius as a pathology. Furthermore, the work aims to examine the construction of a “rhetoric of the disease”, their strategies and functions, in Los Raros (1896-1905) by Rubén Darío, from the analysis of the normal/abnormal conceptual binomial and the emergence of psychiatric discourse as power of normalization in end-of-century artistic productions. The author proposes that the literary portraits that Darío draws in his work reveal a tension between two types of gaze on the normal and the pathological. On the one hand, the artistic gaze of end-of-century artists with an ambivalent discourse that informs about a use of a pathological genius as an artistic ideal; on the other, the psychiatric gaze, which establishes a series of diagnostic and classification devices for abnormal subjects. Darío will face this clinical gaze from the pages of his literary portraits through a discourse that dismantles the episteme of the medical-psychiatric discourse and questions the fluctuating place that modernist writers occupy in the incipient Buenos Aires consumer society.

Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism

The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry’s clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable.

The ‘disabilitization’ of medicine: The emergence of Quality of Life as a space to interrogate the concept of the medical model

This article presents an archaeological inquiry into the early histories of Quality of Life (QoL) measures, and takes this as an occasion to rethink the concept of the ‘medical model of disability’. Focusing on three instruments that set the ground for the emergence of QoL measures, namely, the Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS, 1948), and the classification of functional capacity as a diagnostic criterion for heart diseases (Bainton, 1928) and as a supplementary aid to therapeutic criteria in rheumatoid arthritis ( Steinbrocker, Traeger, and Batterman, 1949 ) – I discuss how medicine, throughout the emergence of QoL, began to expand its gaze beyond the confines of the body to what that body does in daily life. Building upon Armstrong et al.’s notion of ‘distal symptoms’ (2007) and Wahlberg’s idea of ‘knowledge of living’ (2018), I propose the notion of disabilitization to encapsulate this expansion of the clinical gaze, through which medicine has come to articulate diseases and their treatments in new ways, and in so doing, has inadvertently created disability as a new kind of knowledge category in itself – a category that is defined not through its reduction to mere pathology, but through its dispersal into everyday life. I present this concept not as a periodization, but as a provocative discontinuity with the totalizing history assumed within the medical model of disability, and in so doing, ask what, in fact, holds ‘the medical model’ together, and whether there might be other ways of understanding medicine’s complex relationship to disability than what the concept of the medical model allows us to envisage.

Redirecting the Clinical Gaze

Film has been used in medical education for many years to teach both medical students and residents. This has taken many forms, from informal “movie clubs” to organized seminars embedded into curricula. This chapter reviews the literature on the use of film in medical education. It then presents a unique model for how films can augment postgraduate training. Using an example of a close reading of the film Son frère (2003), the chapter suggests that film can be used to provoke reflection on certain characteristics of clinical work, including the unpredictability and irrationality of illness and the experience of not-knowing. Experimental and nonlinear narratives can amplify these themes by challenging viewers’ expectations. The chapter then discusses various practical considerations for teaching using cinema, including film and venue selection, screening rights, and community partnerships. Lastly, sample lesson plans and suggested resources are provided as examples to aid curriculum development.