Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: emotional strain

  • The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part I

    Dustin Grinnell Boston, Massachusetts, United States Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.— Rudyard Kipling Literature is medicine for the soul In the 1980s, the mother of Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary scholar, was in the hospital, ill and delirious. Seeking to ease her suffering, her father gave her the twenty-five books…