Tag: Spring 2015
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Reflections on medicine and art
Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia Oscar Wilde believed that life imitates art and that what we perceive is beautiful only because “art” has taught us to regard it as such. But if indeed “life is art,” as Maxim Gorki wrote, “to be found in all its beauty and joy,” then clearly life has been with us since…
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The poetics of the body
Rachel BaerPennsylvania, United States Pathographies are narratives that describe the intimate emotional effects of illness and disability. Body Story, a creative work in which Julia K. De Pree shares her experience with anorexia, exemplifies this type of writing. According to the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Eating Disorders Association, anorexia is an…
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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,…
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Rock or bust: Ageing, alcohol, and popular music
Duncan Wheeler Gemma MatthewmanGreat Britain Don’t you know that I feel alrightDoin’ what I doI ain’t gonna tow the lineNot till’ I turn blueAll I got is one short lifeThat’s what people sayAnd I ain’t gonna waste a secondDoin’ what you say. (Lyrics to Slash featuring Lemmy, “Dr. Alibi”) The lead singer of The Who, Roger…
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Calibrating the messiah complex: A success and a failure
Daniel LuftigUnited States It had been Fat’s delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things; get off dope (which he hadn’t done) and stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people). — VALIS1 The term “messiah complex,” though…
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“Hills Like White Elephants” and the collusion of non-communication
Clayton BakerRochester, New York, United States There is a particular type of dysfunctional communication that can occur between doctor and patient, a sort of a temporary folie-a-deux. This “collusion of non-communication” happens when a doctor-patient interview reaches a topic that one or both parties find particularly distasteful, frightening, or shameful. Seeking to avoid, or spare…
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Portrayal of schizophrenia in movies
Akli HadidSouth Korea Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which patients experience irrational paranoid thoughts or simply affective flattening. The onset of the disease is usually around the age of twenty-one. Some 42% of patients tend to have their symptoms progressively disappear, 35% have an intermediate outcome, and 27% do poorly. Those from wealthy families…
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Anastasius the “odd-eyes”
Zeynel KarciogluCharlottesville, VA Although Anastasius I was one of the most capable Byzantine emperors, he and his reign are little known or discussed in modernity (Figure 1). This may be due to his reign being overshadowed by the more dramatic rule of his close follower, Justinian. Becoming emperor in 491, Anastasius died at the age…
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Alcmaeon of Croton, philosopher physician
Steph MagowanRoyal Holloway, University of London Alcmaeon of Croton remains one of the lesser known Presocratic writers, not only because of the sparse nature of his extant work but also because of his fragmentary treatment in modern scholarship. He is mentioned in passing but rarely fully examined, often even excluded entirely in work dealing with…