Tag: Moby Dick
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Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain
Xi Chen Rochester, New York, United States A whale being speared with harpoons by fishermen in the arctic sea. Engraving by A. M. Fournier after E. Traviès. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous…
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The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part I
Dustin Grinnell Boston, Massachusetts, United States Man Reading Book showing cityscape, suggesting an Open Doorway. From iStock. 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…