Tag: Literary Essays
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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 Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Heinrich Hoffmann: The Struwwelpeter; Frankfurt am Main: Literary Institute Rütten & Loening, 1917 (400th edition); Copy of the Braunschweig University Library Call number: 2007-0968. Via Wikimedia. “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.…
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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. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States Ch’ io sono quell gran medico Dottore enciclpedico, 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,…
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On suffering and its depiction in William Carlos Williams’s “The Yellow Flower”
Negin Rezaei Tehran, Iran Passport photograph of William Carlos Williams. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Circa 1920. Via Wikimedia 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…
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The use of force in medicine
Angad TiwariIndiaMallika KhuranaJapan William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), regarded as “the most important literary doctor since Chekhov,” was an American Pulitzer prize-winning writer and poet who stands amongst the few full-time practicing physicians to have achieved literary distinction.1 He regarded art and medicine as “two parts of a whole,” and the intimate doctor-patient interface proved a…
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Essential tremor in a medieval scribe: extracting hidden historical knowledge from the work of the Tremulous Hand
Andrew Wodrich Washington DC, United States Annotations and Glosses of the Tremulous Hand. An anonymous homily contained within Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 113, f. 68r – written approximately 1075 AD in Old English – shows the characteristic shaky script of the thirteenth-century scribe known as the Tremulous Hand. These additions are likely to have…
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Catching Your Death: Infectious rain in the works of Jane Austen
Eve Elliot Dublin, Ireland Willoughby Carries Marianne Home. Image: Carried Her Down the Hill, 1908. By C.E Brock. Wikimedia Commons. Fans of the Netflix romp Bridgerton or any of the Jane Austen film adaptations will likely be familiar with the important social etiquette of inquiring after someone’s health. Unlike the modern throwaway how are…
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Did Ernest Hemingway have the Celtic curse?
Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954. GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0 Considering Ernest Hemingway’s mishaps before he died in 1961 by a self-inflicted shotgun wound, it is surprising that he lived so long. He survived two plane crashes several days apart that left…