Literary Essays
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| 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
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
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
Sabina Dosani
Madness, mind-doctors and Mrs. Dalloway
Martin Duke
Tobias Smollett, MD: his medical life and experiences
George Dunea
Aphorisms and facetiae of Bela Schick
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 FALL ’22
Laura Fitzpatrick
James L. Franklin
To the Glory of God and the Service of Man: The Life of James A. Campbell, M.D.
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 FALL ’22
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
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
Stanley Gutiontov
Oyenike Ilaka
The Joys of Motherhood: The classic Nigerian novel FALL ’22
Sarah Jane I. Irawa
Madame Defarge: the psychology of vengeance
| K – P |
Leah Kaminsky
Sylvia R. Karasu
Hawthorne’s The Birthmark: a failure to find a perfect future in an imperfect present
About face: from revulsion to compassion
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
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
William Marshall
Middle Ages, Middlemarch, and the mid-twentieth century: Idealism at risk FALL ’22
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 FALL ’22
Giuseppe P. Mazzarello
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
Serefnur Oztur
My stroke of insight: a brain scientist’s personal journey
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 FALL ’22
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
Gregory W. Rutecki
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
Mariella Scerri and Victor Grech
The use of language in health and illness narratives
Richard Selzer
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
Anoushka Sinha
Manifestations of madness in King Lear
Mahala Yates Stripling
Richard Selzer: the birth of literature and medicine
Mariel Tishma
More than “toil and trouble”: Macbeth and medicine
Angad Tiwari and Mallika Khurana
Lazaros C. Triarhou
Two odes to Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Satyabha Tripathi
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
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
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
Frank Wollheim
Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history
Afsheen Zafar
Larry Zaroff and Tony Chan
Emily Dickinson’s mystifying in-sight
