Category: Literary Essays
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s bondage of opium
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom His grace, his God-knows-what: for Cupid’s cupWith the first draught intoxicates apace,A quintessential laudanum or ‘black drop,’This makes one drunk at once, … — Byron’s Don Juan (1823) The opium or breadseed poppy (Papaver somniferum) was native to Turkey and was known to ancient Assyrian herbalists. Theophrastus described it in the…
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William Wordsworth: “The blind poet”?
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. He was the totemic father of the Lakeland poets, who extolled the relation between man and the natural world: a wedding between nature and the human mind that to him symbolized the mind of God. A prolific writer…
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Samuel Johnson: “The great convulsionary”
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom This paper reproduces in an abridged form an earlier article by its author1 appraising the evidence that Samuel Johnson suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Several authors have commented on the many eccentricities of Dr. Samuel Johnson (Fig 1).2 Thomas Tyers, for example, has written as follows: His gestures, which were a…
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Love as illness: Symptomatology
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Is love a disease? I mean erotic, obsessive, knees-a-trembling, passionate love. This is a question on which philosophers have descanted interminably. So have anthropologists, physicians, poets, and, in short, all those who suffer what Juvenal called insanabile cacoethes scribendi1 (“the incurable mania of writing”). All these have set forth their…
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Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and Der Struwwelpeter
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”—B.F. Skinner Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a general practitioner in Frankfurt. When an opening for a physician at the Frankfurt psychiatric hospital was announced, he took the job despite having no particular experience in the field. He apparently taught himself and increased…
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A “most perfect interchange”
Satyabha TripathiLucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India [Lydgate held] the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good […] he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of…
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Rejuvenation: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Ch’ io sono quell gran medicoDottore eanciclpedico,Chiamato Dulcamara,. . . Rigiovnir bramate? I’m noted as a scientist,Practitioner and specialist.I’m Doctor Dulcamara…Would you like your youth recaptured? L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), music by Geatano Donizetti, Libretto by Felice Romano, Act I, scene IV1 “Rejuvenation” through medical science is the…
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On suffering and its depiction in William Carlos Williams’s “The Yellow Flower”
Negin RezaeiTehran, Iran Eric Cassell observed that physical pain and suffering are two distinct experiences and that pain is only one of the infinite number of sources that may cause suffering in human beings. Doctors, he believes, need to understand this distinction if they are to establish an effective connection with their patients. Successfully treating…