Alternative Medicine: Contagion and Cure in Karel Capek's The White Plague.

Though written amid an atmosphere of unprecedented medical advance in both diagnosis and therapeutics, Karel Capek's The White Plague takes a starkly critical stance against overconfidence in medical science and its dubious ethical orbit. This article explores Capek's censure of those who would privilege scientific interest in disease over the holistic plight of the sufferer. Provocatively, Capek achieves this not only via the play's content, but also-prefiguring aspects of contemporary live art practice by several decades-by placing audience members in worrying proximity to abject ill bodies. Capek proposes a sort of theatrical homeopathy, suggesting that limited exposure to the threat of disease might spur spectators toward empathy for those who suffer and promote a healthier, more compassionate society.

Representations of epilepsy on the stage: From the Greeks to the 20th century.

Epilepsy is a disorder that has been used by dramatists in various ways over the ages and therefore highlights the views of the disorder as people saw it at the time the plays were written and performed. In the 6th century BC, links between tragedy and epilepsy were developed by Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, in Iphigenia among the Taureans and Heracles where epilepsy and madness associated with extreme violence occur together. Both Heracles and Orestes have episodes after a long period of physical exhaustion and nutritional deprivation. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare wrote plays featuring different neurological disorders, including epilepsy. Epilepsy plays a crucial part in the stories of Julius Caesar and Othello. Julius Caesar is a play about politics, and Caesar's epilepsy is used to illustrate his weakness and vulnerability which stigmatizes him and leads to his assassination. Othello is a play about jealousy, and Othello, an outsider, is stigmatized by his color, his weakness, and his 'seizures' as a form of demonic possession. In modern times, Night Mother portrays the hard life of Jessie, who lives with her mother. Jessie has no friends, her father has abandoned the family, and she has no privacy and is ashamed. Stigma and social pressures lead her to commit suicide. Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw, portrays a governess with dream-like states, déjà vu, and loss of temporal awareness who has been sent to the country to look after two small children and ends up killing one. This novella was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten. Most recently, performance art has been portraying epilepsy as the reality of a personally provoked seizure. Both Allan Sutherland and Rita Marcalo have purposely provoked themselves to have a seizure in front of an audience. They do this to show that seizures are just one disability. Whether this provokes stigma in audiences is unknown. Whether the performance artists understand the potential for status epilepticus has not been discussed. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled "Epilepsy, Art, and Creativity".

Richard's back: death, scoliosis and myth making.

The body of a mediaeval monarch was always under scrutiny, and Richard III's was no exception. In death, however, his body became subject to new forms of examination and interpretation: stripped naked after the battle of Bosworth, his corpse was carried to Leicester and exhibited before being buried. In 2012, it was rediscovered. The revelation that Richard suffered from scoliosis prompts this article to re-evaluate the historical sources about Richard's physique and his posthumous reputation. This article argues that Richard's death and his myth as 'crookback' are inextricably linked and traces attitudes to spinal curvature in the early modern period. It also considers how Shakespeare represented Richard as deformed, and aspects of performance history which suggest physical vulnerability. It then considers Richard's scoliosis from the perspective of medical history, reviewing classical accounts of scoliosis and arguing that Richard was probably treated with a mixture of axial traction and pressure. It demonstrates from the evidence of Richard's medical household that he was well placed to receive hands-on therapies and considers in particular the role of his physician and surgeon, William Hobbes. Finally, it shows how the case of Richard III demonstrates the close relationship between politics and medicine in the period and the contorted process of historical myth making.

[Parkinson's disease in literature, cinema and television]. / La enfermedad de Parkinson en la literatura, el ciney la televisión.

INTRODUCTION. Since James Parkinson published what can be considered the first treaty on the disease that bears his name in 1817, the scientific literature on this pathology has not ceased to grow. But the illness has also been represented in literature, the cinema and on television, where the symptoms, treatment and socio-familial context of the disease have often been examined very closely. AIM. To address the cases in which Parkinson's disease appears in literature, cinema and television, as well as to reflect on the image of the condition presented in those contexts. DEVELOPMENT. We reviewed some of the most important works in the literature dealing with Parkinson's disease from any period of history and many of them were found to offer very faithful portrayals of the disease. Likewise, we also reviewed major films and TV series that sometimes offer the general public a close look at the vision and the impact of the disease on patients or their relatives. CONCLUSIONS. Literature, cinema and television have helped provide a realistic view of both Parkinson's disease and the related healthcare professionals, and there are many examples that portray the actual experiences of the patients themselves, while also highlighting the importance of healthcare and socio-familial care.

TITLE: La enfermedad de Parkinson en la literatura, el cine y la television.Introduccion. En 1817, James Parkinson publico el que puede considerarse el primer tratado sobre la enfermedad que lleva su nombre y desde entonces existe prolija bibliografia cientifica sobre esta patologia. Pero tambien se ha representado la enfermedad en la literatura, el cine y la television, donde se ha otorgado una vision cercana a la sintomatologia, el tratamiento y el contexto sociofamiliar de la enfermedad. Objetivo. Abordar la aparicion de la enfermedad de Parkinson en la literatura, el cine y la television, asi como reflexionar sobre la imagen de la misma en dichos contextos. Desarrollo. Se han revisado algunas de las principales obras de la literatura de todos los tiempos que han abordado la enfermedad de Parkinson y se ha observado que en muchas de ellas se ofrece una vision muy fidedigna de la enfermedad. Del mismo modo, se han revisado las principales peliculas y series de television que, en ocasiones, son un reflejo cercano al publico general de la vision e impacto de la enfermedad sobre los pacientes o familiares. Conclusiones. La literatura, el cine y la television han contribuido a dar una vision realista de la enfermedad de Parkinson, asi como de los profesionales sanitarios relacionados y hay numerosos ejemplos en los que se muestran las vivencias de los propios enfermos y se resalta la importancia de la atencion sanitaria y sociofamiliar.

Holy fools: a religious phenomenon of extreme behaviour.

Monks in Byzantine times (330-1453 AD) often expressed their faith with extreme manifestations of behaviour, such as living on a high column (stylites), on a tree (dendrites) or in crowded urban centres of the empire pretending to be fools for Christ's sake. These Holy Fools exposed themselves to the ridicule and the mistreatment of the citizens, being protected, however, by their state of insanity to mock and violate moral codes and social conventions. The official Church barely tolerated these religious attitudes as promoting deviations from standard orthodoxy, and the Quinisext Ecumenical Council (592 AD) judged them as dangerous and formally denounced the phenomenon. The two most famous of them in Byzantium were Symeon of Emesa and Andrew of Constantinople, whose lives constitute unique testimonies to insanity and the simulation thereof. The survival and transplantation of the Holy Fools in Russia, called "yurodivye", where they met widespread acceptance, confirm their appeal in specific geographic areas and their endurance over time. We attempt to approach the symbolism of holy lunacy and to analyse the personality trends of these "eccentric" saints.

Performing arts medicine-a bibliographic retrospective of the early literature: an historical examination of bibliographic references pre-1975.

Performing arts medicine (PAM) emerged as a medical specialty around 1985. Prior to this time, relatively few publications addressed the identification and concerns of musicians' and dancers' medical problems. To determine what number and types of publications occurred prior to the actual beginnings of PAM as a discipline, and to determine how these original topics compared with present-day publications, a retrospective review of the current bibliographic database of the Performing Arts Medicine Association (PAMA) was undertaken. Out of a total of 12,600 entries to date, 489 references were found published from 1798 through 1974, which represent only 3.9% of the current database listings. One-sixth of the references were originally written in a language other than English. Journal articles were by far the most numerous type of publication. Topics with the highest number of entries included the neurobiology of music (n=77), dental/orofacial matters (71), and biographical accounts of composers or musicians and their illnesses (59). Other frequently published topics included hearing loss, physiology of playing instruments, and instrumental technique and teaching. Early topics with multiple publications included composers' biographies, dystonias, and surgery to improve finger independence for playing piano. Subjects whose publications occurred principally in the last two decades of this review included dermatological disorders, hearing loss, and ballet physiology, teaching, and technique. Those which remain popular to the present day include hearing loss, performance anxiety, focal dystonia, and dental/orofacial problems.

[Epilepsy in literature, cinema and television]. / La epilepsia en la literatura, el cine y la televisión.

INTRODUCTION: Literature, cinema and television have often portrayed stereotypical images of people that have epilepsy and have helped foster false beliefs about the disease. AIM: To examine the image of epilepsy presented by literature, cinema and television over the years. DEVELOPMENT: Epilepsy has frequently been portrayed in literary works, films and television series, often relating it with madness, delinquency, violent behaviours or possession by the divine or the diabolical, all of which has helped perpetuate our ancestral beliefs. The literary tales and the images that appear in films and on television cause an important emotional impact and, bearing in mind that many people will only ever see an epileptic seizure in a film or in a TV series or might gain some information about the disorder from a literary text, what they see on the screen or read in the novels will be their only points of reference. Such experiences will therefore mark the awareness and knowledge they will have about epilepsy and their attitudes towards the people who suffer from it. Novels and films are fiction, but it is important to show realistic images of the disease that are no longer linked to the false beliefs of the past and which help the general public to have a more correct view of epilepsy that is free from prejudices and stereotypes. CONCLUSIONS: Literature, cinema and television have often dealt with the subject of epilepsy, sometimes realistically, but in many cases they have only helped to perpetuate false beliefs about this disease.

Autography as auto-therapy: psychic pain and the graphic memoir.

Over the last three decades, the graphic novel has developed both in sophistication and cultural importance, now being widely accepted as a unique form of literature (Versaci 2007). Autobiography has proved to be a successful genre within comics (the word is used in the plural to denote both the medium and the philosophy of the graphic form) and within this area a sub-genre, the memoir of the artist's own disease or suffering, sometimes known as the graphic pathology, has arisen (Green and Myers 2010). Storytelling and healing have been linked since ancient times, and the disclosure of ones story forms part of the psychotherapeutic treatment of trauma (Herman 1997). This paper will examine, in both graphic and textual form, whether, among the myriad reasons that one might embark upon the labour intensive work of making a graphic memoir, some artists might be seeking some form of healing or catharsis through their work.

The clash of irrationalities in Sophocles' Antigone.

A study of the Greek text of Sophocles' Antigone provides a deeper understanding of the identities and psychodynamic interaction between the play's two main characters. Creon's particular diction, imagery, and even syntax constitute a subtext reflecting his rigidly hierarchical attitude and paranoid fear that defensively overlie his castration anxiety, his persecutory conception of women, and his own body image. His mental collapse is precipitated by the insightful and lexically powerful ad hominem expressions featured in Tiresias's admonitions. Textual analysis also sheds light on the nature of Antigone's incestuous desires for intimacy and clarifies their archaic origins. As death becomes more imminent, Antigone's complex, evolving reaction includes a verbally marked spatial disorientation.

Dr John Hall (1575-1635) and Shakespeare's medicine.

The name of Dr John Hall is familiar to students of Shakespeare but less well known to medical biographers. He was born in 1575 and studied at Queen's College, Cambridge, but had no English medical degree. He was not a member of the Royal College of Physicians (founded in 1518). Around 1600, he established himself in Stratford. In June 1607 Hall married Susanna, Shakespeare's elder daughter. He died in 1635, an eminent Stratford physician and herbalist.

[Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676-1726) - comedian and dentitst. A contribution to the history of medicine and theatre]. / Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676-1726) - Komödiant und zahnarzt. Ein beitrag zur medizin- und theatergeschichte.

In the focus of this article you find Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676-1726), who was active in Vienna at the beginning of the 18th century as a dramatist, actor and theatre-principal, but he also had practised as a dentist. He embodies the theatre-figure "Hanswurst" and ranks as the founder of the Old-Vienna folk-theatre. This combination between medical practising and acting was - as more examples how - no rarity and is interesting from the view of the history of medicine as well as for the history of literature and theatre.