Medicine and Literature
Medicine and Literature
by Emily Selove
The intersections between medicine and literature are too many to enumerate here. Indeed the line between the two is not always clear. A mastery of language has always been part of the medical profession, and health concerns and remedies have always inspired literary treatments. Language itself can be employed as a kind of medicine...
Given the professional necessity to convince patients of a doctor’s authority, even, if necessary, by trickery, it comes as no surprise that the line between medicine and quackery is often blurred. And in literary portrayals of doctors, we can often sense the anxiety of patients who realise that a doctor’s air of authority comes from his specialised, eloquent speech and his medical paraphernalia – professional trappings that are as easily adopted by charlatans and tricksters as by genuine practitioners of the medical arts. The famously cynical writer Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023) portrays one doctor speaking at a patient’s bedside in learned-sounding but completely nonsensical language. ‘I see that you are not keeping anything but a diet above what is necessary and below what is not necessary,’ he says, for example (ed. Iḥsān 1993, vol. 15, 45). This meaningless phrase echoes medical language, which, in its struggle for precision, often sounds confusingly repetitive. For example, Ibn al-Nafīs, a thirteenth-century physician famous for describing the pulmonary circulation of the blood, writes something similar in his commentary on the first Hippocratic Aphorism, which reads, ‘Life is short, the Art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgement difficult. The physician must be ready, not only to do his duty himself, but also to secure the co-operation of the patient, of the attendants and of externals’ (ed. Jones 2005, 98-99). In part of his commentary on this wide-ranging aphorism, Ibn al-Nafīs writes, ‘So it is necessary that you confine yourself to the remainder of an action less than which is necessary or is not necessary to do and is not necessary not to do’ (Ibn al-Nafīs, Sharḥ Fuṣūl Abuqrāṭ, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Pocock 294. f. 7a.). Al-Tawḥīdī can be excused for mocking such language, and the mental tongue-twister that it may unintentionally present...
Left: Two people in a physician’s surgery. From Ibn Buṭlān’s Physicians’ Dinner Party. The manuscript is from 13th century Iraq or Syria.
Sometimes words and stories, even funny and seemingly frivolous stories, can themselves be medicine. This is especially obvious in Arabic erotological literature, a popular genre which (like the Kama Sutra), provided sexual instruction, sometimes dryly medical, and sometimes playfully literary. These works prescribe a number of aphrodisiacs, including not only plants and other medical ingredients, but dirty stories as well. If by reading a light-hearted account of a sexual exploit, one experiences the same physical sensation of arousal that is otherwise sought in herbs and potions, then literature is quite literally a drug. These revelations naturally lead us into questions of the connection of mind to body. Ancient Greek and medieval Arabic medical literatures appear to take a holistic approach to these questions. For example, melancholy, caused by the dominance of black bile in the body, is treatable not only by the purging of disease matters, but also by travel, music, and other cheerful distractions...
Right:The opening page of the Vesalius’ Abridgment of al-Rāzī’s Ninth Book for Al-Manṣūr (Paraphrasis in nonum librum Rhazae).
Continue Reading?
Click here to purchase the 1001 cures book!
"Medicine and Literature" by Emily Selove
~ Chapter Seventeen, Pages 162-167 ~
~ Chapter Seventeen, Pages 162-167 ~
1001 Cures Book tells the fascinating story of how generations of physicians from different countries and creeds created a medical tradition admired by friend and foe. It influences the fates and fortunes of countless human beings, both East and West.