Category: Literary Essays
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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England Many children and young people struggle with the plays of Shakespeare, whose language, poetic meters, and historical content are often baffling at first sight.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 FischerUppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.”– William Osler, M.D. 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 wrote 2,000 books and pamphlets, was imprisoned twice, and was once exiled to England…
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Esperanto and the babble of dreamers
Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel 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 means “where there is…
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The Medical Inkling: R.E. Havard, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien
Sarah O’DellIrvine, California, United States 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 throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Their literary impact has been tremendous, in part because of the incredible success of their two most prolific…
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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…
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Greater than the sum of her parts: The journey of a medical student
Japjee ParmarAmritsar, Punjab, India “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.I saw myself sitting…
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Blake’s autonomous newborn: Neonatal mortality in “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow”
Zoya GurmDetroit, Michigan, United States William Blake (1757–1827) was an artist, poet, and progenitor of the Romantic era. Romanticism represents the artistic and intellectual movement responding to the Enlightenment, industrialization, and political revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.1 A prominent theme in the work of Blake and other Romantic poets is an…