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Brain 2005 128(12):2997-2999; doi:10.1093/brain/awh677
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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NERVOUS ACTS: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, CULTURE AND SENSIBILITY

By George S. Rousseau 2004. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave

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THE DOCTOR IN LITERATURE: SATISFACTION OR RESENTMENT?

By Solomon Posen 2005. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing

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MADAME BOVARY'S OVARIES: A DARWINIAN LOOK AT LITERATURE

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The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Medicine and literature




‘Medicine and literature’ is a topic that has attracted a great deal of interest, scholarly and otherwise, over recent decades. The subject can be approached in a variety of ways and with divergent interests and perspectives. Even the most determined relativist must allow that health, illness and healing are universal aspects of human experience; it is unsurprising that they should provide tropes that pervade the literature of all cultures. This is most obvious in works with an overt medical setting—such as Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. But aspects of the ‘medical’, broadly construed, pervade writings with the most diverse subject matter, form and historical provenance.

Historians of medicine have inevitably been attracted to such literature as an additional source of evidence about attitudes to illness and death, as well as of insights into the social relations of the medical profession, in the past. Certain . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Stephen Jacyna

Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, London, UK

Email: s.jacyna@ucl.ac.uk


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