Title: Viewing the Medical Discourse through the Lens of Literature
1Viewing the Medical Discourse through the Lens of
Literature
2Convergence 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
3??(Vincent van Gogh)
These include epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and
Ménière's disease.
4??(Monet)
Monet's visual disorder Cataracts
5Carolus Horn
Alzheimers disease
6?? (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.
7Medicine 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
8Medicine in Mythology and Literature
Morpheus, the drug morphine
Achilles tendon
9Hippocrates Medicine Becomes a Science
10The 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
11The Plague
Triumph of Death"
12The Plague
13Medical cases in literary history
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- To be, or not to be, thats the question !
14Human 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).
15Nineteenth century
- The Strange Case of Dr.Jehyll and Mr.Hyde by
Robert Louis Stevensons
16Nineteenth century
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Medical monstrosities science, ethics and the
popular imagination
17Twentieth 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
18Twentieth 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
19Twentieth 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
20Twentieth 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
21Representing the mind patient memoirs and
illness narratives
- Woman and madness
- On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
22Seeing 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
23Metaphor and meaning
- Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
24The 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
25Illuminate the path
- Literature and medicine have common denominator-
stories.
By the Deathbed, by Edvard Munch, 1896