Literary Medicine ― Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film

Though modern people generally assume that any given disorder of mind or body will first be described accurately by scientists and clinicians, this volume shows that in the case of mental illness, the earliest and most detailed descriptions often appeared in literature many years or even centuries before medical science began to analyze mental illness in depth. Since there remains a certain literary quality to the description of mental illness even in the clinical setting today, it is interesting to see how literature described it in the past. Editors Bogousslavsky and Dieguez, both medical doctors, present the reader with a wide range of essays covering literary depictions of mental illness. Some of the most well known masterpieces of 19th century and earlier such as the novels of Dostoyevsky, Checkov, Balzac and even Shakespeare turn out to contain remarkably accurate and almost clinical descriptions of what was later classified as schizophrenia, epilepsy, transient ischemic attack, or the sequelae of stroke. Also covered are subjects as varied as alcoholism, psychopathy, movement disorders, Parkinson's disease, Proust's fictional accounts of disease, and even an analysis of Van Gogh's disease as revealed in his correspondence. The volume has quite a few high quality b&w images of historical photos, drawings, and illustrations. More recent literary coverage of mental illness from the early 20th century to the early 21st is also presented. The audience for this book is quite broad in that it can include clinicians as well as the layman with an interest in mental illness and its depiction in well-known literature. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)