Viewing the Medical Discourse through the Lens of Literature

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Viewing the Medical Discourse through the Lens of
Literature

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Convergence of Medicine and Literature

• The ways medical discourses impact on art
  expressions
• The development and context of medicine in
  literary texts
• Examinations of literary texts
• Humanity
• Life stories of human
• beings

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??(Vincent van Gogh)
These include epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and
Ménière's disease.
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??(Monet)
Monet's visual disorder Cataracts
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Carolus Horn
Alzheimers disease
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?? (Munch)
I was walking along a path with two friendsthe
sun was settingI felt a breath of
melancholySuddenly the sky turned blood-redI
stopped and leant against the railing,deathly
tiredlooking out across flaming clouds that
hunglike - blood and a sword over the deep blue
fjord and townMy friends walked on - I stood
there trembling with anxietyAnd I felt a great,
infinite scream passthrough nature.
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Medicine in Mythology and Literature

• Homers Iliad (800 B.C.) begins with a plaque
  sent by Apollo on the Greeks
• In mythology, the arrows of Apollo and his twin
  sister Artemis are often a symbol for the sudden
  onset of disease

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Medicine in Mythology and Literature
Morpheus, the drug morphine
Achilles tendon
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Hippocrates Medicine Becomes a Science
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The Plague (Black Death)
the Eurasian pandemic thought to have been caused
by bubonic plague, beginning in the 14th century
killing half of Europe's population
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The Plague
Triumph of Death"
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The Plague
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Medical cases in literary history

• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• To be, or not to be, thats the question !

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Human Anatomy

• Modern medicine began in 1543 with the
  publication of the first complete textbook of
  human anatomy, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica by
  Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564).

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Nineteenth century

• The Strange Case of Dr.Jehyll and Mr.Hyde by
  Robert Louis Stevensons

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Nineteenth century

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Medical monstrosities science, ethics and the
  popular imagination

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Twentieth Century

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
• with physical suffering becoming the lens
  through which the most fundamental matters of
  human experience are examined
• Narrative medicine

M Faith McLellan,1996
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Twentieth Century

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• The meaning of illness and human nature in a
  tuberculosis sanatorium before the advent of
  antibiotics

M Faith McLellan,1996
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Twentieth Century

• The Plague by Albert Camus
• The Plague, which I wanted to be read on a
  number of levels, nevertheless has as its obvious
  content the struggle of the European resistance
  movements against Nazism.

M Faith McLellan,1996
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Twentieth Century

• Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• A man dies from a tumor, so how can a country
  survive with growths like labor camps and exiles
  ?

M Faith McLellan,1996
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Representing the mind patient memoirs and
illness narratives

• Woman and madness
• On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Seeing and Knowing

• Michel Foucaults The Birth of the Clinic An
  Archaeology of Medical Perception
• medical gaze The clinical gaze is a gaze that
  burns things to their furthest truth (120).
• The Epistemic Change

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Metaphor and meaning

• Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag

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The Role of Literature

• To write prescriptions is easy but to come to
  an understanding with people is hard.
  ----Franz Kafka
• Learn from death and dying in literature

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Illuminate the path

• Literature and medicine have common denominator-
  stories.

By the Deathbed, by Edvard Munch, 1896