Literary Essays

||
A – J

Sama Alreddawi and Barry Meisenberg

A poet for a patient: A tenth century poem by al Mutanabbi

Lena Arampatzidou

Synesthesia in medicine and the humanities

Kate Baggott

A difficult diagnosis: Humor—how we laugh at doctors

Sarah Bahr

“Love Tea” and The Antelope Wife
Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet

Katherina Baranova

The unsexed woman: depictions of women in 19th century fictional literature

Cal Bartley

Heroes and alcohol

Greg Beatty

Bones and Bots: what classic science fiction tells us about contemporary medicine

Angela Belli

Dr. Blockhead’s victory: up there, down here

Ending one’s life on the stage

Alan Bleakley

Under the lime tree: medicine, poetry, and the education of the senses

Victoria Bonebakker

Humanities at the heart of healthcare

Rachel Bright, Kevin Qosja, and Liam Butchart

Dr. Peabody, the ideal medical practitioner

Basil Brooke

‘The lament of the Old Woman of Beare’—contrasting the passage of life

Liam Butchart

Camus, Meursault, and the Biopsychosocial Model

Liam Butchart and Olga Reykhart

Emily, Usher, and American Gothic perspectives on mortality

Vasudha Chandra

Remembering Charlotte Brontë

Xi Chen

Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain

Maria Chicco

Anatomical descriptions in the Iliad

Kathleen Coggshall

Sylvia Plath: the tortured artist?

Elizabeth Lovett Colledge 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning—isolation and the artist

Jack Coulehan

Walt Whitman: a difficult patient

Paul Dakin

Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s “eminent loony doctor”
Professionalism in crisis: Dr. Winkel and The Third Man

Niamh Davies-Branch

The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats

Noah DeLone

Latin and medicine

Sabina Dosani

Madness, mind-doctors and Mrs. Dalloway

Martin Duke

Tobias Smollett, MD: his medical life and experiences

George Dunea

PDF Document Aphorisms and facetiae of Bela Schick

PDF Document Aphorisms from Latham
John Keats – one whose name was writ in water
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, apostle of women’s liberation
Doctor Johnson and his ailments
Friedrich Nietzsche—much afflicted philosopher
Indo-Europeans and medical terms
Samuel Pepys: Stones and groans

George Dunea and James L. Franklin

Rudyard Kipling and the medical profession

Kathryne Dycus

Reading the brain in John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”
Children treating children: Anne Shirley as clinician

Eve Elliot

Catching Your Death: Infectious rain in the works of Jane Austen

Francesco Enia

An Eliotian journey through suffering

Carol-Ann Farkas

The literary breakdown in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Howard Fischer

Of Mice and Men: a differential diagnosis for Lennie Small 
Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor, (and Bob Dylan) 
Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine
Dr. AJ Cronin: Still persona non grata?
Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and Der Struwwelpeter
Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov and morphine

Laura Fitzpatrick

Pushing back at perceptions of epilepsy: the interplay between medicine and literature in three 19th-century British novels

James L. Franklin

PDF Document Prescription for a Healthy Nation: A New Approach to Improving Our Lives by Fixing Our Everyday World

PDF Document To the Glory of God and the Service of Man: The Life of James A. Campbell, M.D.

PDF Document Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him and the Age of Flimflam
A bit of irony: Sir William Wilde and Oscar Wilde
George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War: A brush with death
Rejuvenation: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
Ben Hecht and the “Miracle of the Fifteen Murderers”

Ashleigh Frayne

Visualizing the paradise within

Dean Gianakos

Reading poems, saving lives
Wandering lonely as a cloud

Grant Gillett and Robin Hankey

Sophocles’ Antigone and the complexities of suicide

F. Gonzalez-Crussi

We are all hospitalized (metaphorically speaking)

Love as illness: symptomatology

John Graham-Pole

The truth of the imagination

Valerie Gribben

The Brothers Grimm under the knife

Janet Ming Guo

Schizophrenia in Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary

Zoya Gurm

Blake’s autonomous newborn: Neonatal mortality in “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow” new

Stanley Gutiontov

Chekhov: “Ward No. 6”

Oyenike Ilaka

The Joys of Motherhood: The classic Nigerian novel

Sarah Jane I. Irawa

Madame Defarge: the psychology of vengeance


K – P

 

Leah Kaminsky

Fluorescence

Sylvia R. Karasu

Hawthorne’s The Birthmark: a failure to find a perfect future in an imperfect present

About face: from revulsion to compassion

Trisha Kesavan

Ondine’s curse: You sleep, you die new

Anika Khan

Gilgamesh and medicine’s quest to conquer death

Mahek Khwaja 

The Yellow Wallpaper: the flawed prescription

Anna Lantz

The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library: a cultural treasure
Erik Waller the book collector

Anna Lantz and Einar Perman

The basilisk—a cause of sudden death

John Last

Medicine and literature: passion, compassion, confusion and other emotions in stories of sickness and healers

Carol Levine

New opioid epidemic: another long day’s journey

Marshall A. Lichtman

The most enduring fictional character in literature, Sherlock Holmes, created by a physician

Philip R. Liebson

Did Ernest Hemingway have the Celtic curse?

Kevin R. Loughlin

It’s elementary: the addictions of Sherlock Holmes

Pekka Louhiala and Raimo Puustinen

Placebo effect or care effect? Four examples from the literary world

Maite Losarcos

The new pandemic new

William Marshall

Middle Ages, Middlemarch, and the mid-twentieth century: Idealism at risk

James Mathew and Robert Pavlik

Of pine and man: Reflecting on Henry David Thoreau’s sentiment in “Chesuncook”

Stephen McWilliams

The ordeal of Evelyn Waugh

Giuseppe P. Mazzarello

PDF Document Goethe, his love rivals and evidence of a generalized anxiety disorder

Jamie McKinstry

Experiencing metaphor: a medieval headache

Lea Mendes

The medical journey of Charles Dickens

Atara Messinger

Margaret Edson’s W;t: lessons on person-centered care

Sally Metzler

Robert Louis Stevenson and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia

Lucille Miao

Climate trauma in Monique Roffey’s Archipelago

Lisa Mulleneaux

Ella’s addiction: the story of a mother and morphine

Tony Miksanek

Grumpy doctors and the short story

Tamas F. Molnar and Katalin Aknai

Occupational lung malignancies: role of malachite

Joshua D. Niforatos 

Love, cancer and the caregiver’s faith of C.S. Lewis

Raymond Noonan

Using Latin to settle medical pronunciation debates

Sarah O’Dell

The Medical Inkling: R.E. Havard, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien new

Serefnur Oztur

    PDF Document My stroke of insight: a brain scientist’s personal journey

Japjee Parmar

Greater than the sum of her parts: The journey of a medical student new

J.M.S. Pearce

Observations on acronyms
Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817-1848): A tale of aspiration and decline
George Gordon Lord Byron and his limp
The Gold-Headed Cane revisited
Joseph Bell and Conan Doyle
Plain Words, or pandemic medical gobbledygook
A note on medical metaphors
Gouty quotes
Somerset Maugham
Dr. William Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary

Samuel Johnson: “the great convulsionary”

William Wordsworth: “The blind poet”?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s bondage of opium
The Scriblerus and other clubs
William Blake
Some Dickensian diagnoses
Poets at the Craiglockhart War Hospital new

Giorgina Barbara Piccoli and Martina Ferraresi

Cosmas and Damian: a southern Italian story of tolerance, sex, war, religion, and medicine

Solomon Posen

The doctor in literature: the abortion and the abortionist


R – Z

 

Negin Rezaei

On suffering and its depiction in William Carlos Williams’s “The Yellow Flower”

Nicolas Roberto Robles

Rilke: A poet’s death
Heinrich Heine and the mattress tomb
Novalis: The white plague and the blue flower
Coleridge and the albatross syndrome
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s neurological disease
Jorge Luis Borges: Brilliant blindness
Baudelaire’s spleen WIN ’23

Gregory W. Rutecki

Poe’s consumptive paradox

Gregory W. Rutecki and Milad Matta

Ladies in red: medical and metaphorical reflections on La Traviata

Bonnie Salomon

Emily Dickinson and medical ethics: the “Belle of Amherst” as ethicist

Jamie Samson

The other kingdom

Mariella Scerri and Victor Grech 

The use of language in health and illness narratives

Robert Schell

“No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money-changer”: Who said it first? new

Richard Selzer

Richard Selzer on writing

Fergus Shanahan

The unloved gut
The professor and the playwright on what it means to care

Sualeha Siddiq Shekhani

Intersection of faith and science in Garcia-Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons

Michael D. Shulman

Saints on trial

Anoushka Sinha

Manifestations of madness in King Lear

Mahala Yates Stripling

Richard Selzer: the birth of literature and medicine

The surgeon storyteller

Mariel Tishma

More than “toil and trouble”: Macbeth and medicine

Angad Tiwari and Mallika Khurana

The use of force in medicine

Lazaros C. Triarhou

Two odes to Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Satyabha Tripathi

A “most perfect interchange”

Annette Tuffs

The morbid poet: Gottfried Benn, the morgue and the mysterious postcard

Mary Vallo

Resounding silence: the trouble with Hamlet’s body and soul

Narrative control and the monster within: empowering disability in Jane Eyre

Sean Varner

The iron crab

Christopher Walker

Two tales of talipes equinovarus

Roslyn Weaver

Medical mysteries and detective doctors: metaphors of medicine

Simon Wein

Melville’s Bartleby: an absurd casualty

Winona Winkler Wendth

Shiloh

Maarten Wensink

Tolstoy: insights for doctors and other humans

Mila H. Whiteley

Reason vs. Emotion in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

Sarah Wise

Why ‘Nurse’ Grace Poole is the greatest puzzle in Jane Eyre

Andrew P. K. Wodrich

Essential tremor in a medieval scribe: extracting hidden historical knowledge from the work of the Tremulous Hand

Frank Wollheim

Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history

Afsheen Zafar

Jane Eyre and tuberculosis

Larry Zaroff and Tony Chan

Emily Dickinson’s mystifying in-sight