Articles, Papers and Studies

Büchner’s Lenz: An early study in schizophrenia

Georg Büchner’s short story Lenz deals with the historical Lenz’ dramatic three weeks stay at Oberlin’s in the Alsace, in particular with the outbreak of what is nowadays taken to be a schizophrenic psychosis. A few days after Oberlin had sent Lenz back to Strasbourg, he wrote down an account of how Lenz gradually became so mad and dangerous that he could no longer stay. The following summary of the main episodes of Lenz’ visit is based on that account.

Two souls, competing in one breast

Ethical problems surrounding "the dark side of man"
in screen adaptions of Robert L. Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

The use and abuse of mental illness in fiction

Madness has always fascinated people. The neuro-psychiatric diagnosis epilepsia was called ”The Holy Disease” already in ancient Egypt. Since then psychosis in general, with its delusions and hallucinations, has often been looked upon as a medium for messages from hidden, transcendent worlds and the psychotic person as a human beeing with mystic powers and foresight.

Iris Murdoch and dementia: the complexity of personal relations

John Bayley has published three books with regard to his spouse, the famous writer Iris Murdoch, who passed away in 1999. The books spring from the notes he has made during (and after) the more than four years that she suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Don Quixote's diagnoses: an historical approach

Was Don Quixote mad? In other words, should he really be considered a mental patient? I realise that the character, Alonso Quijano, and particularly his alter ego, Don Quixote, has been regarded as a model of illness, is a suitable subject for scientific study.

Lightness and moral values in Anorexia Nervosa

According to the ICD-10, the central feature of anorexia nervosa is “deliberate weight loss”. In other terms, anorexia is a deliberate pursuit of lightness. The person pursues lightness with different methods: mainly by control of food intake and by compensatory practices – vomiting, exercise, use of diuretics and laxatives.

What does ethics mean to medical students: fiction and reality?

In this paper I firstly try to look at ethics from a multiple choice point of view. To my point of view ethical questions can not be covered by such a scheme.
Secondly, I describe three friends and their attitudes towards ethics. One works on an intensive care unit and deals with concrete problems there one tries to study in times of struggle one deals with ethical questions from a social and philosophical point of view.
To my point of view their ethics are closely connected to reality, but influenced by fiction and different experiences.

Knock or the triumph of medicine

At the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, general practitioners in training perform the play. In secondary schools throughout Europe that same play is read as a lesson in French, founded on a vocabulary of 1800 words.

The French actor Louis Jolivet became famous in the film version.

We are of course talking about Knock ou le triomphe de la médecine published by Jules Romains in 1924. It is a morality play for young doctors, a tool for mastering French for school children and popular comedy, still running in France

Ex-humans how to face them squarely?

As some of you may remember, during our last meeting in Vienna I argued against the feasibilty of our enterprise by pointing at the fact that so far it has proved impossible to point at any fictional initiative that had a modifying effect on medical practice.

Today I would like to turn things round a little by pointing at an ethical issue first and presaging a fictional outburst second, if there isn’t already one around at this very moment.

First of all the issue, which I will put to you in a rather blunt fashion:

are patients in the last stages of dementia still human beings?

THINK WITH A STORY: ‘the magic skin’ of Honoré the Balzac.

The Art of Forgetting

In the novel Scar tissue Michael Ignatieff describes the dementia of his mother. At an old age, she started painting. One of her favourite painters was Willem de Kooning.