Tag: Literary Essays
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Dylan Thomas’s terminal illness
JMS PearceHull, England Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea.– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”, 1937 The poet Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914–1953) was born in Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea on 27 October 1914. He was much in awe of, but devoted to his father, an English teacher at Swansea…
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ReJoycing in words and medicine
Fergus ShanahanCork, IrelandEamonn QuigleyHouston, Texas, United States Making mejical history all over the show!-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (FW) 514.2-31 James Joyce (1882–1941) is celebrated for his portrayal of the lives of ordinary people in his native city. Like many of the great writers, he had a lot to say about illness and disease. He was…
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Tales of the psychosomatic in the Lyrical Ballads
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States The year 1800 saw the publication of John Haygarth’s historic pamphlet Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body, an inquiry into what we now know as the nocebo and placebo effects. The same year saw the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s…
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Art, anhedonia, and family psychodynamics in the creativity of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Stephen MartinThailand There are interesting questions about how the mental phenomenology of the great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne1 drove his work. His supreme narrative gift and engaging observation were shadowed by anhedonia, which is a complete or partial lack of the ability to experience pleasure and a hallmark of clinical depression. In modern criteria,2 major depressive…
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Miguel Hernández
Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain Miguel Hernández was born on October 30, 1910, in Orihuela (Alicante, Spain). His father, Miguel Hernández Sánchez, was a cattle dealer, and his mother, Concepción Gilabert Giner, did the housework and took care of their four children. Miguel had very few years of schooling. At the age of four, he attended…
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The Lambs’ Tale
JMS PearceHull, England Many children and young people struggle with the plays of Shakespeare, whose language, poetic meters, and historical content are often baffling at first sight. Those who persevere and overcome these difficulties learn to love and wonder at Shakespeare’s unsurpassed language and humane tales of comedy, tragedy, and history. Many educational books and…
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Drs. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Osler, and the method of Zadig
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.” – William Osler, M.D. Paw prints. Photo by Peter Castleton on Flickr. CC BY 2.0. M. de Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was an Enlightenment historian, philosopher, and writer. He opposed France’s absolute monarchy and the power of the church. He…
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Esperanto and the babble of dreamers
Simon Wein Petach Tikvah, Israel L.L. Zamenhof L.L. Zamenhof (1859–1917) was an ophthalmologist and philologist from Białystok, then in Russia, now Poland. In the 1880s, he created a new language called Esperanto. The word Esperanto comes from the Latin, spiro, which means “to breathe.” Spiro also means one who hopes. Thus, loosely translated, Esperanto…
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The Medical Inkling: R.E. Havard, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien
Sarah O’Dell Irvine, California, United States R.E. Havard and C.S. Lewis at The Trout Inn, Oxford, circa 1950s. Private collection. Used with permission of the Havard Family. In a smoky back corner of an Oxford pub and the book-filled rooms of Magdalen College, the celebrated writing group known as the “Inklings” gathered, debated, and laughed…
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Poets at the Craiglockhart War Hospital
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kindom In the First World War, the writer Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) (Figs 1 and 2) received the Military Cross for bringing back wounded soldiers under heavy fire.1 He was admitted to the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh in 1917,2,3 where he befriended Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) and described his emotional reactions in “Repression…