Tag: Literature
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The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part III
Dustin Grinnell Boston, Massachusetts, United States A cure for loneliness In the video “What is Literature For?” produced by The School of Life, author Alain de Botton claims that books are a cure for loneliness. Since we cannot always say what we are really thinking in civilized conversations, literature often describes who we genuinely are more…
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The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part II
Dustin Grinnell Boston, Massachusetts, United States The placebo effect When first exploring literature’s psychological effects on the reader, it is important to consider whether a book can have healing properties by acting as a placebo. In Persuasion and Healing, Jerome Frank discusses the importance of the connection between patient and healer. In his chapter on the…
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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 of…
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Balancing empathy
Nora SalisburyVancouver, BC, Canada I almost fainted on my first clinical day in nursing school. I was invited to watch a catheter insertion. While my gut reaction was to completely avoid it, I knew that as a new student nurse I was supposed to be excited about these kinds of opportunities. Watching the procedure I…
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“Something monomanical”: obsession and the unity of effect
Jack RosserHerefordshire, England, United Kingdom The concept of monomania first gathered popularity in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the term “referred to a type of mental disorder in which a person would have fixed, and often grandiose, ideas that did not correspond to reality.”1 These ideas would be “confined to a single…
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Placebo effect or care effect? Four examples from the literary world
Pekka LouhialaRaimo PuustinenFinland It is common knowledge that patients may exhibit improvement following an encounter in which no specific drugs or effective medications were prescribed. Indeed, even fictional doctors have often been depicted as knowing that their patients may require no active drugs and that their mere presence, their advice and encouragement, will often lead…
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Connecting literature with medicine
Rubina NaqviKarachi, Pakistan There is a need for increasing the education of medical students through the use of literature, so that physicians can become knowledgeable about and eager to confront the social, economic, and cultural contributors to illness. This is particularly important when one considers the great differences in economic, environmental, and health-related resources between…
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That reminds me of a story: The language of narrative in medicine
Ann RedpathNew York City, United States Story is ubiquitous. It’s no wonder that it shows up in medicine.How does narrative feed medical language? “I have over 500 patients,” the heart surgeon raised her voice in exasperation. “I just want you to hear my side of the story,” the patient countered. Too late. The doctor had…
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The psychiatrist in literature
Solomon Posen Good girls didn’t go to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists were people who testified in court on behalf of murderers or who nannied film stars. They were themselves charlatans, ratbags, sex-obsessed, evil and/or mad (Coombs 1990: 26). Within three years of graduation some 5% of doctors emerging from British medical schools elect to become psychiatrists and…
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Creativity and psychopathology in literature
Montserrat KawasChicago, Illinois, United States “There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.” — Aristotle“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” — Edgar Allan Poe William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among many others, all suffered from one of the most challenging psychiatric illnesses,…