Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

DAS LEBENSWERK DES FËDOR M. DOSTOJEVSKIJ IM KONTEXT DER EPILEPSIE

Medical doctors and friends alike have confirmed that Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy. It was an essential part of the poet's life, his selfdetermination and literary creativity. Thus, he was able to appreciate all the ups and downs of human life, for example, in the character and ambivalence of Prince Myshkin. The novel became a paradigm of modernism in which medicine and literature are no longer contradictions, but offer an analytic view of human existence.

A Literary Inquiry into Disability, Trauma and Narrative Strategies in Lisa Genova’s Novels

The reaisltic illustration of central characters suffering from rare and severe neurological sicknesses in Lisa Genova’s novels provide an ideal prospect to study trauma in pathography novels, a subset of science fiction. However, despite its scope, these genres of novels have received little consideration in American literary trauma studies. This paper will present a new analysis of trauma in relationship to the ‘neuro’genre, followed by an analysis of narrative and literary devices employed by the author to illustrate traumatic episodes in her novels. Through this case study and critical reflection of how the author has engaged trauma in the novels supports strengthening literary trauma theory within trauma literature and the genre also. The writing of traumatic experiences of the victims, transformed identity, stigmas, fears and phobias and providing face to the sufferer doomed fate, offers an opportunity for a neuroscientist turned novelist like Lisa Genova to advocate about the neurological sicknesses and its suffering with enriched empathetic experience to the non-scientific societies. It also provides a balanced realistic narrative platform for the reader to reflect on their own uncertainties, brought on by the representation of such fictional characterization. This literary research analysis will provide scope to science fiction authors, particularly those aiming to engage with medicine and literature, for a more accurate depiction of trauma in their work. It will further broaden the scope of research in phenomenology, narrative and genre theories and criticism in literary studies.

Absurdity in Medicine. Stanisław Trzebiński’s Philosophy of Medicine

Stanisław Trzebiński (1861–1930), professor at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, was one of the most distinguished representatives of the Polish School of Philosophy of Medicine before the Second World War. He undertook studies in neurology, philosophy of medicine, and literature. The article explores Trzebiński’s philosophical ideas, especially his call for rationality in medicine and the concept of absurdity in medicine as a precondition for the development of medical knowledge and practice. Today this method is an essential background in Evidence-Based Medicine and confirms cultural and scientific forms of cognition.

Medical and colonial discourses in A. P. Chekhov's book “Sakhalin Island”

The article presents an analysis of the conceptual and medical context of the book “Sakhalin Island”, examines Chekhov's attitude to medicine and literature, and analyzes various (including foreign) approaches to studying medicine and problems of colonization in literary texts. The topic is also relevant because, as we know, in the XIX century publicism was rather restricted by the government, both in the choice of topics and in the ways of their coverage. In many ways, literature took on the role of defender of ordinary people, including exiled convicts. The authors examine how, in addition to the lack of basic medical care, poor sanitation, and the specific local conditions causing various illnesses in people unaccustomed to Sakhalin climate, these people had feelings such as loneliness, melancholy, despondency, and unwillingness to live - in short, all the symptoms that are now commonly referred to as depression and psychopathology. Through a number of literary devices, A. P. Chekhov creates a satirical effect and disavows the authorities' allegations. The authors show that the focus of Chekhov's book is on the living conditions of the people and the serious mistakes made by the state during the exploration of Sakhalin. Comparing Chekhov's observations with statistics and factual data from other sources, the authors emphasize that government officials do not understand the importance of Sakhalin for Russia, the need to develop its natural resources, the inadmissibility of ignoring local ethnic and cultural conditions, the neglect of people, etc. The article concludes that Chekhov's observations are closely related to legal, economic, and historical records of the time.

Técnica e sensibilidade no ensino médico em tempos de distanciamento social

Editorial for the supplementary number of RIES, which will be on medicine and literature, based on the extension course entitled “Medicine in interface with Literature: About the use of oral narrative during medical consultations” , which resulted in eight essays on the themes addressed.

Desvendar, esclarecer - Literatura e Medicina em Fernando Namora

Through a study of the “book” Deuses e demónios da medicina, by Fernando Namora, this essay explores the critical dialogue between the author/doctor and his works, seeking a broad convergence between the fields of medicine and literature. The discussion of several books by the author, by way of analogies or dissonances, will highlight the unity that underlies his evolutionary path as one of great coherence. Accordingly, the twenty-one “romanticized biographies” of doctors, which constitute the referred book, testify to particular plot building strategies which can be found in the entire work of the writer, doctor and intellectual.

Inspiração e transfusão

In this essay, we consider the experience of a doctor/ writer, thinking through the ways in which literature and medicine complement each other for an enhanced perception of human beings. The humanist dimension of Medicine is thus stressed, despite the technological and bureaucratic paraphernalia of current medical activity. Several answers are suggested for many of the questions that such topic raises: what makes doctors write? What do they write about? Where does their inspiration come from? In the end, an irrefutable conclusion is reached: Medicine and Literature are two of the most beautiful arts in the world.

Saecular Discourse

Even during Augustus’ own lifetime, it was possible to speak of an “Age of Augustus.” This concept emerged from an earlier tradition of qualitative periodization, the applications of which already extended beyond political promotion. Beginning during Sulla’s ascendancy, and continuing throughout the first century BCE, Roman intellectuals divided time into discrete units marked by characteristic qualities, a form of periodization that inherently narrativized history. The potential of this “saecular discourse” for sophisticated thought and description contributed to its growing importance throughout the century, linking disparate intellectual fields during this period of Roman cultural “revolution.” This chapter examines how the concept of the “Augustan saeculum” and the rhetoric of an Augustus-led return to the aurea saecula appeared alongside unrelated saecular discourse on medicine and literature, thus competing with (rather than dominating) these alternative saecular histories.