Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine Edited by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan J Routledge TwerS rane Groupst published 2015, by Rowtledge 71 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge isan imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis “The right ofthe editor to be identified asthe author ofthe editorial material and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. llrightsreserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted os reproduced of utilised a any form of by any eeceroac, mechanical oe other means, nv known a hereafter invented, including photocopying aod recording, or in any information storage of retrieval system, ‘without permission in waiting from the publishers. “Trademack notice: Product oF corporate names may be trademarks or segstered tademacs, and are used only for ilentication and explanation without intent to infringe Library of Congress Cataloging in Publicaion Data Latin American and Iberian perspectives on leerstute and medicine edited by Pattcia Novilo-Corvalan. ges cm. — (Routledge incr disciplinary perspectives on literature 5 46) Includes bibliogeaphical reterences and inden ‘. Latin American ltearore—History and etticis, 2, Literature and medicine, 3, Comparative teeaure--Latin American and Therian 4. Comparative literatare—Iberian and Latin American, 5. Iberian Peninsola~Lateratares—History and cttcsm. I Novillo-Corvalin, Patricia, elton PQ7081.1354 3015 860.9 9823 2oiso0si7s SBN: 978-1-138-82390-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1.315.74179-6(ebk) “Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Printed and hound in Great Britain by ‘T) Intemational Lid, Padstow, Cormwall, Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction: Medical Humanities Perspectives on Iberian and Latin American Literature 1 PATRICIA NOVILLO-CORVALAN 2. Explorers of the Human Brain: The Neurological Insights of Borges and Ramén y Cajal 23 PATRICIA NOVILLO.CORVALAN 3. The Anti-Diagnostics of Jlio Dinis and the Medical Hubris of Egas Moniz 45 SUZANNE BLACK 4 Oculists and other Modern Visionaries: Epistemological Myopia in José Fernindez Bremén’s Un crimen cientifico 64 ROCIO RODTIER 5. Emilia Pardo Bazin and the Diagnosis of Cultural Diseases 85 ANNE W. GILFOML 6 Darwinism and Identity: Evolution, Science, and Medicine in Aluisio Azevedo’s O milato 105 ELIZABETH A. MARCHANT 7 Simén Bolivae’s Illness in Gabriel Gareia Marquer’s The General in His Labyrinth 127 OLIVIA VAZQUEZ: MEDINA 8. Healing the Family in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate 149 DEBRA D. ANDRIST9 10 uw 2 Contents Health and/as Sickness in the Fiction of Julio Cortézar DOMINIG MORAN Asthma and its Symbolism: The Respiratory Aesthetics of José Lezama Lima WILLIAM ROWLANDSON ines and Uropia in Alejo Carpentier'’s The Lost Steps and Severo Sarduy’s Beach Birds GUILLERMINA DE FERRART Calligcaphies of Illness in Contemporary Catalan Culture: The Power of Metaphor MONTSERRAT LUNATI Contributors Index 163 183 202 224 247 249 List of Figures 1.1 Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Aesculapius holding a staff encircled by a snake. Size: sheet 31.8 x 19.7 cm. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. 2.1 Santiago Ramén y Cajal, Line drawing of the retina Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. 261 Introduction Medical Humanities Perspectives on Iberian and Latin American Literature Patricia Novillo-Corvalén This introductory chapter offers an overview and a reappraisal of the emerg- ing field of the medical humanities from the ars medica in Ancient Greece to the significance of the ‘two cultures’ debate in the study of literature and medicine, and the recent rise of the genre of the ‘pathogeaphy’ or illness narrative, taking as a point of departure Susan Sontag’s seminal treatise Hlness as Metaphor (1978). The chapter also considers the various ways in which Iberian and Latin American literature can enrich and offer valuable insights to the medical humanities, showing that critical perspectives out- side the mainstream Anglo-American paradigm can provide important case studies for contemporary debates about cultural representations of health and disease. ‘THE CLASSICAL TRADITION The conception of medicine as an art of healing is inherently embed- ded in the classical origins of the medical tradition, a medicinal craft that played an important role in the development of holistic practices in ancient Greece. The art of medicine is traditionally associated with the Olympic deity Apollo, god of poetry, healing, and prophecy, who stands as an apt symbol for the confluence and reciprocity between medicine and the arts. Anne Hudson Jones invokes Apollo as an emblem for ‘the ancient union of medicine and poetry’, a convergence that further sup- ports ‘the relationship between literature and medicine’ (Hudson Jones 1990: 11). Apollo's son, the demigod Asclepius (Latin Aescula’pius), inherits the medicinal attributes of his divine father and is enshrined in the Greek pantheon as the legendary founder and patron of Medicine. Asclepius’s archetypal rod with its intertwined sacred snake represents the ancient origins of medicine as an art. According to J. Schouten, the rod of Asclepius ‘shares the privilege of everlasting life’ and was used to both ‘cure the sick’ and ‘snatch the sick from death’ (Schouten 1967: 41). ‘The coiled snake, meanwhile, symbolises the healing potential of medi through its powers of regeneration by cyclically shrugging off its skin (Novillo-Corvalan 2014: 133).2 Patricia Novillo-Corvalén Bigure 1.1 Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Aesculapius holding a staff encircled by a snake. Size: sheet 31.8 19.7 em. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, ‘The Roman poet Ovid positively refers to Asclepius as ‘the god of health and hope’ and in Book XV of the Metamorphoses tells the wondrous tale of how Asclepius’ healing powers purged Rome from the pestilent plague that hhad assailed the city. Ovid endows Asclepius with what may be considered a prophetic speech that foretells the everlasting ubiquity of the Asclepian rod-and-serpent emblem that has been subsequently adopted as the symbol for the medical profession: Fear not! I shall come And leave my images. Only be sure To note this snake that twines about my staff ‘And mark it well to fix it in your (Ovid 1998 [AD 8}: 371-2) Introduction 3 ‘Equally significant, moreover, is the pervasive medical influence of Hippocrates’ celebrated ‘Oath’, in which he begins with an invocation to the healing powers of Apollo and Asclepius and other Greek deities, as he forges the ethical precepts of the medical profession: ‘T swear by Apollo the Healer and by Aesculapius, by Hygiea and Panacea, and by all gods and goddesses, making them my wit- nesses that I will fulfil according to my power and judgement this oath and this covenant’ (see Brock 1972: 35). The medical legacy of Asclepius also appears in Homer’ Iiad, a foundational epic poem about the utter devastation inflicted by warfare, suffering, and death. In effect, the Hliadic world is renowned as ‘much for the capricious gods passionately engaged in human conflict, as for its visceral scenes of carnage, slaughter, and destruction. Roy Porter claims that “painstaking scholars have counted some 147 cases of battle wounds in the liad (Chat is, 106 spear thrusts, 17 sword lashes, 12 arrow shots, and 12 sling shots)’ (Porter 1999: 51). For example, in Book IV the Trojan archer Pandaros— persuaded by Athena's desire to rekindle the sluggish battle ~ shoots an arrow at the warlike Menelaus, the disgraced husband of Argive Helen. The nonfatal ‘wound caused by the bitter arrow’ is described with unsparing physical detail, asthe shaft ‘grazed the man’s skin and straightaway from the cut there gushed a cloud of dark blood’ (Homer [c. 800 BC] 1961: 117). The physician Machaon, the son of Asclepius and bearer of the respectful Homeric epithet ‘blameless physician’, is immediately summoned to the battlefield to cure the wounded ‘Menelaus.? Machaon’s art of healing is described in a key passage that affords the reader a vivid description of pre-Hippocratic Hellenic medicine: He [Machaon] pulled the arrow forth from the joining of the war belt, and as it was pulled out the sharp barbs were broken backwards. He slipped open the war belt then and the flap beneath it with the guard of armour that bronze-smiths wrought carefully for him. But when he saw the wound where the bitter arrow was driven, he sucked the blood and in skill fid healing medicines on it that Cheiron in friendship long ago had given his father. (Homer 1961: 119) From a medico-historical viewpoint, this extract sheds light on the practice of traditional Asclepiad medicine in Ancient Greece, laying emphasis on the patient-healer interaction that privileges the medical ‘arts’ of empathy, effi cacy, and the application of health-giving herbalist remedies. The Asclepiad- physician loosens the clothing and armour of the wounded warrior, carefully removes the arrow and sucks out the blood emanating from the wound, which is skillfully treated with herbal remedies to alleviate pain and encour- age healing and purification. The poet of the Hliad points out that Machaon learned his medical craftsmanship from his divine father Asclepius, who was, in turn, tutored in the use of medicinal herbs by the wise centaur Chiron. This information draws attention to the porous boundaries between medicine, religion, and myth in pre-Hippocratic medicine, particularly in relation to4. Patricia Novillo-Corvalén the cult of Asclepius (see Kerényi 1959). Above all, this medical interlude in the Iliad foregrounds the interrelationship between literature and medicine by offering a unique portrayal of an Asclepian healer pitted against the larger backdrop of the Trojan War, on the one hand, and the overt use of medical imagery, themes, and language embedded within the epic poem, on the other. “The Homeric poems’, writes Vivian Nutton, ‘afford us a glimpse of medical ideas and practices long before any of our strictly medical literature” (Nutton 2004: 24). In a similar vein, Edmund Pellegrino believes that ‘no medical lecturer could evoke the experience of illness with the intensity achieved, for example, in Homer's depictions of the lacerating, and flesh-tearing assault of spear and arrow’ (Pellegrino 1982: 21). Thus the quoted extract from the Iliad demonstrates that medical history is bound to literature through lan- guage and representation. Moreover, this excursus in the martial plotline of the Homeric epic offers the reader a rmuch-needed respite from the tragic and gruesome scenes taking place in the battlefield, thus disclosing an alternative narrative of healing in which the wounded are cured and comforted. ‘THE RISE OF THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES The classical tradition that elevates medicine as an art of healing has been continued and reinforced by the creative interaction between medicine and literature, a cross-fertlisation that stands at the forefront of the emerging field of the medical humanities. The recent development of this discipline has led to the creation of an interdisciplinary practice able to defy academic com partmentalisation and to foster productive in-between spaces across medicine and the humanities. It thus appears that equal rights to the human body have been claimed by physicians working within the sanitised environments of the laboratory and the hospital and by literary scholars eager to strip, dissect, and anatomise the body on the bare page. Margaret Healy rightly draws attention to ‘how much literature through the ages has been preoccupied with illness, disease, death and with social sickness too — with making sense of the more troubling and contested aspects of life’ (Healy 2011: 2) ‘The rapid growth of interdisciplinary studies in the last three decades goes hand-in-hand with the establishment of the medical humanities as a field of study in its own right.’ Its gradual institutionalisation is particularly evi- dent in the appearance of cutting-edge, multiisciplinary academic journals in the field from the 1970s onwards, including the prestigious UK-based, Medical humanities, the US-based Journal of Medical humanities, and the highly respected Literature and Medicine, a biannual periodical published by the John Hopkins University Press. Another important development in this ‘emergent field is the founding of new centres and associations of Medical humanities within the academy, such as the Association for Medical Humani- ties, founded in 2002 at the University of Birmingham Medical School, and the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas medical Introduction 5 branch, to name just a couple. In addition, Medical Schools across both sides of the Atlantic have innovatively responded to this disciplinary and pedagogi- cal change by adapting their undergraduate programmes of study in order to incorporate humanities and interdisciplinary courses. According to Hawkins and McEntyre these types of courses teach would-be-health practitioners ‘to listen more discerningly to their patients’ stories (particularly since] literature and literary skills enable physicians to think both critically and empatheti- cally about moral issues in medicine’ (Hawkins and McEntyre 2000: 5). This interest in storytelling and a ‘narrative’ approach to medicine was introduced by Rita Charon, herself a physician and a literary critic, who advocates a type of medical practice that values the ‘narrative skills of recognising, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the stories of illness’ (Charon 2006: 4). According to Anne Whitehead, Charon ‘has played a leading role in creat- ing the movement of narrative medicine, which is centrally concerned with ‘opening up new approaches in medical education’ (Whitehead 2014: 107).As such, narrative medicine seeks to critique a type of biomedical clinical practice that has become desensitised to the needs and stories of patients, thus high- lighting the important role of narrative training in fostering more empathetic and compassionate health practitioners. Therefore, health practitioners are ‘cognisant of the increasing importance of the humanities in the development of a more humane medical care that listens to the personal stories of patients. INTERDISCIPLINARY DEBATES: THE TWO CULTURES Ata time when leading cultural theorists such as Terry Eagleton have pro- claimed the demise of theory (Eagleton 2004), and the frontiers berween academic disciplines have become increasingly blurred (Moran 2010), it is paramount to reflect upon this recent boom in interdisciplinary stud- ies in the new Millennium and the fertile debates it is provoking about new ways of working at the interface between the sciences and the humanities. This approach, however, seems to fly in the face of C. P. Snow's polemical Cambridge lecture “The Two Cultures’ (1959), where he protested that schol: arship had been irredeemably split into two polar groups, and from which ensued a series of academic wars about the possibility of establishing an encounter between the sciences and the humanities. In effect, the type of anxi- ety postulated by Snow (and the acidic attack subsequently launched by FR. Leavis) has been belittled by Michael Neve, who dubbed it as ‘just another ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee show’ (Neve 1993: 1533). In doing so, Neve is astutely alluding to the preceding high-profile Victorian sciencelliterature debate between Matthew Amold and T, H. Huxley. Again, Allen Thiher similarly views the Snow-Leavis debate as ‘a noisy tempest in a teapot’, yet validates its indisputable significance as a ‘necessary point of reference’ in discussions of literature and science (Thiher 2005: 4). Thiher then puts forth the claim that science and literature are not irreconcilable domains but, rather,6 Patricia Novillo-Corvalén ‘share a cultural matrix setting forth presuppositions, axioms, and constraints for all endeavours to make sense of the world” (Thiher 2005: 1). The critical reciprocity underlined by Thiher foregrounds the important fact that the so- called schism or disjunction between the sciences and the humanities has been called into question, not least because both are part, so Suzanne Black argues, of the shared domain’ of culture as discursive modes in their own right (Black 2007: 570). To be sure, medical discourses and medical practice belong to, and are embedded in, the same cultural sphere in which literature operates. Ika Livingston pertinently refers to these types of productive spaces across disciplines as ‘transcoding operations among various realms of the knowl- edge network’ (Livingston 2006: 5). Laura Otis illuminates this further by arguing that ‘the relationship between literature and science is one of mutual feedback and suggestbility, each contributing to and drawing upon the “cul ture medium” out of which it grows’ (Otis 1999: 3). In an ironic twist, fur- thermore, George Rousseau claims in a recent article that the Snow polemic further stimulated and reinvigorated the relationship between literature and ‘medicine (Rousseau 2012: 169). And cultural and literary historian Sandet Gilman made the pertinent point that as a matter of fact there were never two polarised ‘cultures’ or ‘worlds’, as Snow contentiously claimed, since both ‘address the basic question of the nature of life and death, using differ- ‘ent means and different approaches ~ yet both use language to narrate and communicate’ (see McCance 2002: 2). Gilman's emphasis on the “diferent approaches’ used by literature and medicine, however, is worth stressing here, particularly since the labeling and conceptualisation of medicine as another “cultural discourse’ runs the risk of ironing out the crucial methodological differences between both disciples. Hawkins and McEntyre cautiously warn of the dangers intrinsic in ‘the rhetoric of reconciliation, characterized by such. phrases as “achieving a synthesis of the literary and the medical” or “reconcil- ing the two cultures” (Hawkins and McEntyre 2000: 3). The lesson here, if any, is that the medical humanities ought not to strive towards an uncalled-for fusion or homogenisation of disciplines but, rather, to pay heed to vital differ- ences in approach, scope, and outlook, while also fostering, promoting, and enhancing their underlying synergies in this timely interdisciplinary exchange. WHAT CAN IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE OFFER TO THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES? {As the first edited collection devoted to the exploration of the literature and ‘medicine nexus in Iberian and Latin American fiterature, this book inter rogates what these disciplines can offer each other and how this creative exchange can reinvigorate both fields of study. This area of research can illuminate and improve the field of the medical humanities by mapping out a largely overlooked corpus of writers and themes. Indeed, one of the aims of this book is to provide a more inclusive cultural perspective in a field overly Introduction 7 reliant on Anglo-American literature as its main paradigm, showing that the ‘medical humanities has much to gain from a more wide-ranging, globalised approach. | am referring here to the need to open up the field to the medical traditions and cultures outside the mainstream Westernised canon in order to develop a pluralised interchange of the relationship between medicine and the arts. For example, Claire Hooker and Estelle Noonan have criticised the emergence of a ‘quasi-Western canon of medical humanities (in history, philosophy, literature, and art) in which the diversity, sophistication, and richness of different cultural traditions was uncomfortably marginalised’ (Hooker and Noonan 2011: 79). They have also launched an attack on what they call the ‘teaching epistemology’ of the medical humanities, in which university curricula are over-reliant on ‘Western cultural artefacts’, resulting in the ‘marginalisation’ of other cultures and traditions (Hooker and Noonan 2011: 80). On the other hand, it is fair to say that since the publication of Hooker and Noonan’s article, the medical humanities has experienced a promising shift that demonstrates the gradual internation- alisation of a self-renewing discipline, For example, Therese Jones declares that'a simple inventory of submissions to the Journal of Medical Humanities demonstrates a trend that may very well indicate both the growing interest in and global spread of the medical/health humanities’ (Jones 2014: 32). She positively notes that from ‘January 2009 to December 2012, roughly 40 per cent of all submissions came from authors outside the US’, adding that scholars and educators from all corners of the world are now repre- sented (Jones 2014: 33). Therefore, the task of the medical humanities is to continue ‘generating an appreciative, ethical understanding of persons and bodies in socially and/or medically disadvantageous circumstances’ (Hooke and Noonan 2011: 79), whilst also embeacing cultural diversity by looking beyond Western-centric models. From an educational viewpoint, medical humanities undergraduate and graduate courses ought to be significantly broadened so that future medical practitioners can show sensitivity to,and a greater understanding of, different medical cultures from around the world. Thus, this book reflects this international shift and seeks to offer a con- ceptual framework that explores the rich and diverse medical traditions of Iberia and Latin America, particularly the way in which writers and artists reflected on the personal, social, and cultural effects of illness. ‘This attention to cultural diversity and to the different contexts in which ‘medicine operates isin tune with Alan Bleakley’s call for the implementation of a ‘critical medical humanities’ (Bleakley 2014: 23-24), an approach that, in this case, challenges ‘tame’ and “uncritical” Western trends in an attempt to re-evaluate the core values, objectives, and priorities of the discipline. This edited collection explores and documents a distinctive tradition of medical histories and representations of health and disease across an immensely var- ied geographical area, At the same time, the book establishes vital links with other traditions by underlining the wider reciprocal interchanges implicit in these medical readings that can offer valuable transcultural insights. The8. Patricia Novillo-Corvalén collection also shows that the art of medicine relies as much on the dissecting precision of a scalpel as it does on the discursive context in which medicine is embedded, and the narratives it creates. In this sense, the book focuses on a wide range of themes and perspectives that can provide important case studies and theoretical frameworks for contemporary debates about neuroscience, medical ethics, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, the rising genre of the pathography, the physician-patient relationship, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope (as theorised by Susan Sontag). Therefore, scholars and health practitioners will be able to draw important lessons and valuable critical perspectives from the medical and intellectual landscape presented in this book. Inevitably, as expected, this volume does not intend to offer an overarching cultural narrative of health and disease in Iberia and Latin America. Indeed, the development of this book has brought to light the sheer multiplicity of possible approaches to cultural representations of health and disease. As I engaged with this fascinating area of research, I became mindful of the impossibility of offering a single, uniform ‘per- spective’ to this enormously complex area of study. For example, an alter- native version of this book could have advanced a critical exploration of the cultural history of disease during the Columbian conquest of the New World, as the meeting between these two civilizations triggered one of the most devastating health epidemics in the history of medicine that led to the decimation of the indigenous population. Roy Porter sums up this encounter as ‘the most momentous event for human health’ that precipi- tated ‘the conquest of the New World by the Old World's diseases’ (Porter 1999: 163). The Spaniards introduced fatal diseases to the Amerindian peoples, including smallpox, influenza, typhus, and deadly microbes for which their immune systems had no biological defences. This alterna- tive ‘biological’ historiography of the conquest has been championed by Alfred W. Crosby in his pioneering 1972 study, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, in which he examines the consequences of this asymmetrical exchange that had a disastrous impact on the Latin American population and its ecosystem (Crosby 1972). ‘Whereas this study focuses more specifically on modern and contempo- rary representations of disease in a corpus of Spanish, Catalan, Portu- guese, and Latin American literature from the fin de siglo to the present day, it would be erroneous to say that, on a wider scale, the consequences of the ‘Columbian exchange’ bear no significance to the chapters pre- sented in this collection. ‘When examining the relationship between literature and medicine in Iberia and Latin America itis highly appropriate co begin, as a preamble, with a brief discussion of one of the greatest archetypes of illness in Spanish literature, Don Quixote, a schizophrenic character endowed with 2 unique type of literary madness (later conceptualised as ‘quixotism’). Indeed, Don Quixote suffers from a rare mental condition that has been Introduction 9 triggered by the unusual combination of sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and the excessive reading of chivalric romances. As Anne Cruz puts it, ‘no reader of Cervantes can fail to observe his abundant examples of literal and literary madness, of visual and verbal illusions, and of fragmented and fractured selves? (Cruz 2002: 186). In a strict sense, moreover, Adrienne L. Martin writes that Cervantes’ understanding of disease was deeply rooted in the Hippocratic humoral theory and, consequently, Don Quixote’s malady was understood as an ‘imbalance’ of the four bodily humours (Martin 2002: 163). Cervantes’ interest in health, disease, and medicine also owes to the fact that his father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, was a practicing surgeon and, consequently, the young Miguel would have grown up ina medical environment where physical procedures such as “dressing wounds, drawing teeth, dealing with venereal sores and chan- cres, treating skin abrasions |...] and the most common surgical procedure (indeed, the profession’s badge) bloodletting? (Porter 1999: 189) were performed on a regular basis. In the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (1613; Exemplary Novellas) — a collection of short stories sandwiched in between the publication of the first and second parts of Don Quixote (part 1 1605, part II 1615) ~ Cervantes offers an unsparing portrait of himself that explores the process of aging, the nature of physical disabil- ity, and the notion of personal identity: The man you see here, with aquiline face, chestnut-coloured hair, smooth, unwrinkled brow, joyful eyes, and curved though well- proportioned nose, silvery beard which not twenty years ago was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth neither large nor small ~ since he has only six, and those are in poor condition and worse alignment; of middling height, neither tall nor short, fresh-faced, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooping, and none too light on his feet. [...] He was many years a soldier, five and a half a prisoner, when he learnt patience in adversity. He lost his left hand in the naval battle cf Lepanto, from a blunderbuss wound, which, although it looks ugly, he considers beautiful, since he collected it in the greatest and most memorable event that past centuries have ever seen [.. (Cervantes 1992 [1613]: 3)* ‘Whilst on the surface the tone of the passage is unmistakably humorous and self-deprecatory, at a deeper level the portraitist is constructing his identity through the interplay between personal achievement and physical disability. Cervantes challenges traditional perceptions of disability by turning the injury to his left hand — which famously earned him the nickname ‘el Manco de Lepanto’ (‘the cripple of Lepanto’) ~ into a sign of pride that favours a conception of physical impairment as a positive rather than a negative, an ‘enabling rather than disabling condition, and a symbol of personal triumph as opposed to a devastating tragedy. According to Anthony Cascardi, the10. Patricia Novillo-Corvalén canonicity of Cervantes is usually condensed in ‘a sole physical mark - the hhand that was maimed by gunfire in the battle of Lepanto’ and which for Cervantes became the salient physical trait that positively defined his sense of self and personal honour (Cascardi 2002: 1). Here Cervantes clearly refuses to be stigmatised and to be assigned what Ato Quayson defines as “the negative cultural and social stereotypes’ that serve to ‘demean persons with disability’ (Quayson 2007: 205-6). ‘The development of the novelistic genre in general and Hispanic literature in particular is inseparable from Cervantes’ epochal novel and its landmark formal and technical innovations, psychological study of subjectivity, and paradigmatic application of irony, parody, and satire. The Cervantine legacy ofa specific type of literary consciousness based on monomania, the clash between reality and illusion, and the pursuit of idealism as a form of social critique became a blueprint for Tberian and Latin American writers, from Unamuno to Ortega y Gasset, from Paz to Fuentes, from Borges to Bola. At the same time, generations of writers worldwide, including Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Melville looked upon Cervantes asa diagnostician able to identify the moral and social malaise afflicting modern societies, as well asthe more ‘universal’ spiritual ills affecting the human condition. In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault identifies Don Quixote as the supreme exemplar of ‘the madman, understood not as one who is sick but as an established and maintained deviant, as an indispensable cultural function’ (Foucault 2004 [1966]: 54). Don Quixote in this sense, confers onto literature a para- dligmatic model of abnormal behaviour in the figure of an eccentric hidalgo whose antics, delusions, and idealistic imagination provide a form of protest that constantly subverts the status quo. The influence of Don Quixote is, of course, so profound and its impact so widespread that it is difficult to find a writer untouched by his ubiquitous intellectual legacy. Furthermore, the impact of Cervantes’ fiction is perceptible even beyond the arena of literature and the arts. Most significantly, Cervantes has been credited ‘as a possible source of inspiration for the method of psychoanalysis’ (Riley 2005: 91), thus implying that his fiction served as one of the most important formative precursors of Freud's ‘talking cure’. It has been suggested that the story ‘El cologuio de los perros’ (1613; ‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’), which presents the reader with the wondrous conversation between two hospital dogs, Berganza and Scipio, closely resembles a psychoanalytic session (Riley 2005). Ina February 1884 letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays, Freud writes of his childhood fondness for Cervantes’ ‘humorous philosophical conver- sation between two dogs’ and how his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein would typically adopt the role of Berganza (the analysand) and himself that of Scipio (the analyst) (Freud 1961: 96-97). The presupposition that Cervantes’ canine narrative influenced the birth of psychoanalysis, along- side Greek mythology, is testament to the unique representation of human subjectivity in the Cervantean corpus. Finally, if Don Quixote is upheld as a fundamental ‘medical’ landmark, his legacy is nowhere more evident than Introduction 11 in the scientific and literary achievements of the Spanish pathologist, his- tologist, essayist, short-story writer, and Nobel laureate Santiago Ram6n y Cajal, widely known as the father of neuroscience for his ground-breaking scientific research and discovery of the ‘neuron’. The critic Harley Williams has dubbed Cajal ‘{Spain’s] greatest countryman since Cervantes’ and ‘Don Quixote of the microscope’ (Williams 1954: 16) for his systematic exploration of the human brain, which epitomises Cajal’s quixotic feats and remarkable achievement during a historical period of national defeat (see Chapter 1). NARRATIVES OF ILLNESS ‘An important rising trend in the medical humanities is the genre of the “pathography" or ‘illness narrative’, which Anne Hawkins defines as ‘a form of autobiography or biography that describes personal experiences of illness, treatment, and sometimes death’ (Hawkins 1999: 1). In a similar vein, Angela Woods reviews the role of narrative in medicine as a practice that offers ‘privileged access to the subjective experience of illness’, as well as ‘transformative and even therapeutic’ healing effects (Woods 2011: 73). ‘The pathography thus offers chronic or terminally ill patients the cathartic opportunity to describe their personal stories of illness, enabling them to regain their voices by reinventing their experiences of suffering through the ‘medium of language. The ‘literary’ pathography, in turn, would correspond- ingly convey a writer's battle with an incurable disease or chronic condition, reflecting on the self-conscious confessions that emanate from the body and its relationship with the writing process. The subject matter of the thera- peutic power that literature (and the arts in general) exerts upon writers and artists affected by illness constitute the keystone of Philip Sandblom’s influential study Creativity and Disease: How Illness Affects Literature, Art and Music (1992), which explores the aesthetic nexus between illness and creativity. Sandblom investigates the complex ways through which ‘many great authors, artists and composers have had their work affected by disease’ (Sandblom 1992: 20), particularly the interaction between art, suffering, and healing. Writers afflicted by disease become ‘wounded storytellers’, to bor- ‘row the title from Arthur W. Frank’s seminal study The Wounded Storyteller (1995), as ‘the stories that ill people tell come out of their bodies [...] The body, whether still diseased or recovered, is simultaneously cause, topic, and instrument of whatever new stories are told’ (Frank 1995: 2) One of the most influential pathographies of the twentieth century is Susan Sontag’s treatise IlIness as Metaphor (1978) and its companion sequel Aids and Its Metaphors (1989), subsequently published together as one single piece. Sontag wrote the former while she was undergoing breast cancer treatment in the late 1970s and used the book as a platform to launch an acerbic attack against the ‘stigmatization of people who have12. Patricia Novillo-Corvalén cancer’ (Sontag 1991: 97). Her socio-cultural critique focuses on the overly pessimistic mystification that ‘cancer = death’ (Sontag 1991: 100), as well as denouncing the deep-rooted assumption that cancer sufferers are char- acterologically predisposed to the disease. However, rather than offering a first-person account of her experience as a cancer patient, Sontag fleshed out an impressive cultural and literary history of the symbolic constructions of illness in Western culture from the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century to the military metaphors associated with cancer in the ‘twentieth century. Her unreserved condemnation of the myths, metaphors, and stereotypes surrounding TB and cancer notwithstanding, she opens the book with a metaphorically-loaded reflection that portrays illness as ‘the night-side of life’: Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the ‘well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. (Sontag 1991: 3) Apart from inevitably underscoring the binaries health/sickness, life/death, and heaven/hell, Sontag conveys a topographical demarcation in which the spiritual connotations of the ‘kingdom of the sick’ conjure up a pur- gatorial ‘other place’ infused with an otherworldly quality evocative of Hamlet's ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ (Shakespeare {c, 1600-1604) 1997: 3.1.81-82). This unremitting use of figurative language to articulate the experience of illness is a far cry from Sontag’s condemnation of metaphorical thinking and her ensuing assertion that ‘illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’ (Sontag 1991: 3). Her contradic- toriness stems from the crucial fact that itis virtually impossible to strip metaphorical thinking from illness, not least language, which is inherently metaphorical. For all its controversy, however, Sontag’s championing of a more ‘truthful’ approach to illness that challenges the status quo is still extremely relevant to contemporary attitudes to disease. So in Aids and Its Metaphors Sontag, reconsidered her prior claim, admitting that ‘of course, fone cannot think without metaphors’, while cautiously adding, ‘but that does not mean there aren't some metaphors we might well abstain from or retire’ (Sontag 1991; 91). At the same time, as Anne Hawkins puts it, “even if we agree with Sontag that illness should be stripped of metaphor, ‘myth, and symbol ~ and not everyone will agree with her about this ~ it is an expectation that few of us would live up to” (Hawkins 1999: 23). In this sense, there is no reason to presuppose that writing about illness should therefore rule out a type of conceptualisation reliant on metaphoric think- ing, It is worth mentioning at this stage that a large number of chapters Introduction 13 in this edited collection (Black; Vazquez-Medina; Rowlandson; Moran; De Ferrari; Lunati) utilise this type of symbolically-driven somatic imagery to discuss the various ways in which Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Latin American writers have reflected on the subject of illness across the centuries, This is not to say, however, that medical metaphors of illness are taken at face value or are injudiciously or inadequately employed, nor that Sontag’s lesson has been overlooked, but rather that metaphoric tropes and motifs ‘may be enabling as well as disabling’ (Hawkins 1999: 25) in our cultural understanding of representations of disease. In recognising the literary pathography as a category in its own right, it is possible to retrospectively map out this tradition that focuses on autobiographical reflections on the subject of illness. For example, Vieginia ‘Woolt's essay On Being Iil (1930) is perhaps one of the most compelling twentieth-century pathographies. In part this work reflects on her life-long struggle with mental illness, and in part it meditates on the human condition, principally in her preoccupation with the sick body, the incommunicability of pain, invalidism, and illness as a transcendental experience. For a writer such as Woolf literature is the antidote to illness, a purging and liberating creative release, an unexpurgated autobiographical response that reveals the writer's inner self through the process of writing: ‘There is, et us con- fess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals’ (Woolf 2002: 11). Iiness, then, encourages the revelation of inner suffering and distress as part of a cathartic or ‘confessional experi- ence, whereas health, on the contrary, tends to cloak these private feclings under a veneer of decorum and respectability. The British writer Hermione Lee looks upon Woolf's creative transformation through illness as a process that can be found in language and writing and the work of the imagination’ (Lee 2008: 96). Woolf, in this way, offers a redeeming conception of illness that bestows upon words ‘a mystic quality’, as part of a state of mind that allows the writer to ‘grasp what is beyond {the} surface meaning’ of words (Woolf 2002: 11; 21). Looking at the rising genre of the pathography from a Latin American lens, we find a number of prominent writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Roberto Bolaiio, who have developed what may be now read as writings that poetise their personal experiences of illness. Ina lecture titled “La ceguera’ (‘Blindness’; 1980) Borges poignantly constructs his own illness narrative by reflecting on his condition as a blind poet, tracing a genealogy of blind bards in Western literature from Homer to John Milton, ‘James Joyce, and the French-born Argentine writer Paul Groussac. tis well- known that Borges was plagued with eyesight problems from an early ages according to his biographer, Emir Rodriguez Monegal, ‘he belonged to the fifth recorded generation of Borgeses to have very poor eyesight’ (Rodriguez Monegal 1988: 80), and Edwin Williamson similarly notes that ‘he had suffered from acute myopia since early childhood [and later on] developed14° Patricia Novillo-Corvalén cataracts, an ailment that had afflicted his father and appeared to run in the family’ (Williamson 2004: 164). Rodriguez Monegal mentions that Borges resignedly admitted that ‘blindness ran in my family’, while at the same time proudly recalling that the operation chat was performed ‘on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal, the Lancet’ (Borges in Rodriguez Monegal 1988: 80). By the time Borges was appointed Director of the Argentine National Library (Buenos Aires) in 1955, he was totally blind, a rather ironic twist for a writer who effusively proclaimed that ‘Thad always imagined Para~ dise as a form of library’.® In ‘Blindness’ he presents his loss of vision as a Homeric affliction that is inevitably caught between the dialectics of loss and gain, curse and gift, and the visual world and the aural world. Whilst openly testifying that ‘the blind live in an uncomfortable world’, he also serenely admits that ‘being blind has its advantages’, enumerating a cata- logue of ‘dones’ (gifts) that were brought upon by his blindness (Borges 1990 III: 276; 280-1).” Thus for Borges the gradual onset of blindness paradoxically ‘gifted” him with the shimmering light of the colour yellow, the everlasting silhouette of a tiger, the stady of the Anglo-Saxon language, the return to poetry, and the directorship of the library. In ‘Poema de los dones’ (Poem of the Gifts’; 1960), the latter biographical event is famously described as, ‘God, with magnificent irony/granted me books and blindness’ (Borges 1990 I: 187).* In a similar vein, in his poem ‘Elogio de la sombra’ (‘In Praise of Darkness’; 1969), he muses on his literary journey through blindness, and opposes, once again, physical blindness to creative insight, recalling the example of the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus who allegedly ‘plucked out his eyes to think’ (Borges 1990 I: 395).? Finally, in his autobiographical essay a blind and elderly Borges reflects: In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remem- ber regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have ‘mnemonic virtues. (Borges 1987: 49-50) Another meaningful reflection on illness is conveyed in Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Enfermedades en mi casa’ (‘Illnesses in my House’; 1935), composed in the wake of the traumatic birth of his first and only daughter, Malva Marina ‘Trinidad (1934-1943), who developed the life-threatening condition hydro- cephaly (Moran 2009: 73). Written as an anguish-laden ‘lamento’, this haunting poem is suffused with copious images of suffering and impending death, as the poet seeks to describe the implacable malaise deeply rooted “en mi casa’. In the last three verses of the first stanza, the poet utilises an Introduction 15 expressive anaphoric construction with syntactic parallelism to emphasise that he is writing under the shadow of extreme suffering: There is nothing bue weeping, only weeping, ‘because there is suffering, only suffering, ‘And nothing but weeping. (Neruda 1991; 238)! In the second stanza this sentiment is continued but is complexly intertwined ‘with a dominant imagery of destruction, where the distressed poet contem- plates how the life of his vulnerable and unnamed ‘nifa’ (little girl) is sucked away by a vampiric and monstrous tree, “The blood of the litdle gir! rises through the moon-stained leaves’ (Neruda 1991; 238-9).!! The unmistak- able elegiac tone of the poem is effectively evoked in the closing stanza that shifts into the ‘yo! (I} of the poet, denoting a present sense of urgency that foregrounds the grief and weariness of the poet, now describing himself as “cansado’ (weary) and ‘herido’ (wounded). Thus the ‘wounded poet? con- structs his story as a conduit to express and relieve his suffering, ‘I write this poem which is only a lament/only a lament’ (Neruda 1991; 239). From a biographical perspective, moreover, ‘Enfermedades en mi casa’ may be read in parallel to a 19 September 1934 letter that Neruda wrote to the Argentine poet Sara Tornti de Rojas Paz (affectionately nicknamed as ‘la Rubia’), in which he describes the fatal symptoms of Malva Marina’s incurable illness, ‘che tiny thing suffered horeibly from a haemorrhage that appeared in her brain after birth’ (Neruda 1991: 44).!5 A slightly more optimistic account of her illness, however, is described in a previous 25 August 1934 letter to his father (Feinstein 2004: 110-11). For Jason Wilson and Carlos Cortinez, the poem becomes a lyric complaint and a vehicle that justifies the pain of the poet (Wilson 2008: 149; Cortinez 1992: 21). Meawhile, Adam Feinstein retrospectively conceives the poem as a ‘helpless tribute to the sickly git?, and Hernén Loyola argues that it illuminates the way in which Neruda’s per- sonal experience is transmuted into poetry (Feinstein 2004: 110). What is significant, therefore, is that it remains the only poem that Neruda wrote for his daughter, offering a unique insight into his rarely expressed feelings as a father, and the way in which he used poetry as an antidote to suffering In mapping out the genre of the pathography within Latin American literature, another prominent example is the Chilean writer Roberto Bolafio. He explores the healing potential of the medico-literary genre of the pathography in a haunting essay entitled “Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad’ (2003; Literature + Illness = Illness’). He poignantly reflects om his personal experience with liver disease and the complex and dif- ficult process of writing with, and about, a terminal illness. Illness, for Bolaifo, is inherently metaphorical, lacing the relationship between illness and literature as an interchangeable alchemical formula that results in the transmutation of illness as a narrative. Therefore, the sum ‘literature16 Patricia Novillo-Corvalén plus illness equals illness? expresses the essential relationship between art, healing, and storytelling, invoking Bolafio’s meditation on the human con- dition. The personal tone of Bolafio’s account about his hepatic disease is reflected in the inscription to the essay, as he warmly pays homage to his physician, ‘my friend, the hepatologist, Doctor Victor Vargas’ (Bolaiio 2003: 135).!4 On one level, Bolatio is preoccupied with the obvious deaw- backs, or side-effects, of writing with a terminal illness, ‘writing about illness, especially if one is gravely ill, an be agony’ (Bolafo 2003: 136).!5 On another, however, he echoes Woolf's utopian ideal of the healing power of writing, thus endorsing the redeeming potential of literature as'a liber- ating act’ (Bolafio 2003: 136)."* Hence, Bolafo reinforces the belief that literature acts as a potent antidote against the ailing illness experience, while illness, in turn, becomes for the writer a remedy and a source of self-discovery. In addition, the motif of illness in Bolafio’s work functions as a metaphor for the larger epidemic of the social order, which needs to be cured in order for the individual to be healed. This analogy is rooted in the age-old connection between physical pathology and an ailing society, which rests on the assumption that the treatment and healing of bodily illness will restore the health of the body politic (Novillo-Corvalén 2013: 358). Thus, Bolaiio utilises the metaphor of illness as a vehicle to launch a form of social and cultural critique, offering a revisionist version of his- tory from the perspective of the underdog, the outsider, and the wounded, epitomised in provocatively titled books such as Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives) and Putas asesinas (2001; Killer Whores). Bolafio’s recurrent preoccupation with the horrors of history, the general malaise of the modern world, and the exclusion of marginalised groups from mainstream society is encapsulated in the personal crisis of the guilt- ridden character Oscar Amalfitano, who features in the mammoth 2666 (2004) and the posthumous novel Los sinsabores del verdadero policia (2011; Woes of the True Policeman): When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, a black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and ~ the crowning touch — a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a lit- erature professor’ (Bolafio 2013: 86)."7 Juan Masoliver Rédenas observes that Woes of the True Policeman is a novel ‘constantly threatened by the consciousness of physical illness and by the moral sickness of an era’ (Masoliver Rédenas 2012: 13)"8,a statement that applies equally to most of Bolafio’s fiction. OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS ‘The eleven chapters that form this volume situate medicine as an important discourse in Iberian and Latin American literature, while also examining the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions under- pinning illness. The first three chapters, by Suzanne Black, Rocio Rader, Introduction 17 and Patricia Novillo-Corvalin, examine the relationship between medicine, modernity, and human subjectivity. Rodtjer and Novillo-Corvalin show that the science fiction stories of Bremén and Cajal intertwine scientific discourses with literary speculations in the parables of fictional characters whose pecu- liar views of reality (whether myopic or microscopic) raise crucial ques- tions concerning morality, identity, and scientific integrity. Novillo-Corvalan further interconnects Cajal’s science fiction tale ‘The Corrected Pessimist” (1905) with Borges’ story ‘Funes the Memorious’ (1942), arguing that both writers shared a special interest in cognitive processes and the way in which they shape our understanding of the world. Suzanne Black offers a bioethical case study that examines the representation of illness and the diagnostic encounter in the novels of the Portuguese physician-writer filo Dinis. In the second part of the chapter, she re-evaluates the legacy and medical practice of the controversial Portuguese neurologist and 1949 Nobel Laureate Egas Moniz (who pioneered the use of prefrontal lobotomy). Black interlinks both physicians by showing that Moniz was an enthusiastic reader and critic of Dinis, yet at the same time demonstrating that despite this conscious affiliation, Moniz failed to learn the medical restraint of his Portuguese compatriot, thus stressing their antithetical medical approaches. Anne Gilfoil and Blizabeth Marchant survey the fecund, though not unproblem- atic, relationship between literature and science in late-nineteenth-century Spain and Brazil. These chapters explore a cracial historical period under- pinned by a post-Lamarckian and post-Darwinian preoccupation with ideas of evolutionary biology. The interpenetration of scientific concepts in natu- ‘alist novels, particularly issues of race, gender, and class, are explored by Marchant in her discussion of Brazilian national identity in her chapter on Aluisio Azevedo’s novel O muilato (1881), while Gilfoil focuses on represen tations of physical, cultural, and spiritual pathologies in the novels of Pardo Bazén within the wider background of European realism and naturalism. ‘The trope of the sick body’ of the nation that inextricably links the illness of an individual with the larger malaise of the ‘body politic’ constitutes the subject matter of Olivia Vazquez-Medina’s exploration of the depiction of Simén Bolivar’ illness in Garcia Marquez’ The General in His Labyrinth (1989). Her chapter reveals that the deteriorating health of Bolivar’s physical body deploys an organic relationship with the dectining ‘health of the nation’ (‘salud de la patria’), while at the same time uncovering the various metaphorical layers conveyed in the depiction of the tubercular suf- feret, most of which are inevitably suffused with a romantic imagery of the disease. Metaphors of a similar kind pervade the works of Argentine writer Julio Cortézar in his critical commentary on the spiritual sickness that has afflicted a dysfunctional Argentine bourgeois social system and Western ‘man in general. Moran argues that Cortazar resembles Nietzsche in casting himself as a diagnostician who seeks to ‘extirpate the moral canker poi- soning the heart of Western society, however painful that operation might prove to be’. Moran perceptively analyses the interplay between physical18 Patricia Novillo-Corvalén and metaphorical illness in the works of Cortézar, paying particular atten- tion to the story “The Health of the Sick’ (1966), which exposes what he refers to as the paradoxical ‘unhealthiness’ of supposedly ‘normal’ modes of social conduct, The diagnosis of societal ils is also the subject of Debra Andrist’s chapter that examines the medical metaphors underpinning Laura Esquivel’s magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate (1989). Andrist suggests that the interaction between love, illness, and healing is constructed around the activities of cooking and eating, which become powerful, trans- formative agents that restore the well-being of its female protagonist, while at the same time offering a ‘female’ counter-narrative that interrogates prevalent masculinist versions of the Mexican revolution. Guillermina De Ferrari’s and William Rowlandson’s chapters about three Cuban writers ~ Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, and José Lezama Lima - adopt a literary-anthropological perspective. Both pieces reflect on the personal, social, political, and symbolic meaning of illness within the socio-cultural context of Cuba, enabling us to gain an understanding of the complex ways in which these authors portray the relationship between illness, the wounded self, and the community. De Ferrari draws on the defi- nition of illness put forward by the medical anthropologist Jean Benoist, ‘who argues that the process of illness is manifested on two levels, asa social fact rooted in the body or a biological fact inscribed in society’ (Benoist quoted in De Ferrari), and Rowlandson discusses the symbolic resonance of asthma in Lezama Lima’s life and art, arguing that this chronic condition is not a declaration of illness but, paradoxically, of well-being. The final chapter in the collection by Montserrat Lunati provides a per- ceptive reassessment of the relationship between illness and metaphor (post- Sontag),in contemporary Catalan literatureand culture. Drawingon theoretical notions of metaphor from Aristotle to Derrida, Lunati interrogates and differ- entiates between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ uses of symbolic tropes to articulate the experience of the wounded body, enabling the reader to understand that stich depictions should avoid the stigmatisation of the disease, She foregrounds this point through an insightful discussion of contemporary Catalan writers, including Marius Serra, Carles Camps, and Maria-Mercé Margal. ‘NOTES 1. The Mad also depicts the Olympic deities as infictors of plague and disease. As James Longrigg points out, the arcows of Apollo and those of his sister Artemis fare held to be the causes of the sudden onslaught of disease’ (Longrigg 1997: 23), 2. For other examples of healing in Homes, see Medicine in Literature CD-Rom, London: Wellcome Trust, 2004 3. Tam aware of the ongoing debates regarding the use of the term ‘medical hhumanities’ and whether itis a ‘mulidiseipline’,interdscipline’, or ‘discipline’ oon Raree and Candman 2014\ Tam alen awara thar camo echalare cveruneh Introduction 19 prefer the altemative terms ‘health humanities’ and humanities in healthcare" (see Bleakley 2014). It is not my intention, however, to engage with these ‘complex issues of nomenclatuze and terminology in tis introduction, 4. ‘Bowe que veis aqui, de rostro aguileio, de cabellocastaio, frente lisa y desem- buarazada, de alegre os y de nari corva, aunque bien proporcionada; las bar bas de plata, que no ha veinte aos que fueron de oro, los bigotes grandes, la boca pequefa, los dienes ni menudos ni crecidos, porque no tiene sino seis, y ‘308 mal acondicionados y mal puestos, porque no tienen correspondencia los tsnos con los otros; el cuerpo entre dos extremos, ni grande, ni pequco, la color viva, antes blanca que mozena; algo cargado de espaldas, y no muy ligero de pies [.-1. Limase cominmente Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Fue soldado muchos a0, cinco y medio cauivo, donde aprendié a tener de un arcabuzaz0, herida ‘que, aungue parece fea él la iene por hermosa, por haberlacobrado en la mas memorable y alta ocasin que vieron los pasados siglos[.]" (Cervantes 1992 [1613]: 2), 5. See Close (1990; 109-25} for an informative overview of the influence of Dor Quixote in Hispanic and European literature. 6, All translations feom the Spanish ace mine, unless otherwise stated; ‘yo siempre ‘me habia imaginado el Paraiso bajo la especie de una biblioteca (Borges 1990 ML: 278) 7. ‘el ciego vive en un mundo bastante incémodo’s se ciego tiene sus ventajas (Borges 1990 Il: 276; 280-1) 8, ‘Dios con magnifica ironia/Me dio ala vez los libros y la noche’ (Borges 1990 Hl 187) 9. “se arraneé los ojos para pensar (Borges 1990 Tl: 395}. 10. ‘No hay sino llanto, nada mis que llanco, porque sélo suv solamente sufts,y sda mas que llanto’ (Neruda 1991: 238} 11. ‘sube sangre de nia hacia las hojas manchadas por la luna’ (Neruda 1991 238-9). 12, ‘eseriho este poema que sélo es un lamento/solamente un lamento? (Neruda 1991: 239), 13, ‘aquella cosa pequefillasufria horriblemente de una hemoreagia que Ie habia salido ene cerebro al nace’ {Neruda 1991: 4). 14, ‘mi amigo el doctor Victor Vargas, hepatdlogo’(Bolafio 2003: 135). 15, ‘escribir sobre a enfermedad, sobre todo si uno est gravemente enfermo, puede ser un suplicio’(Bolafo 2003: 136). "un acto liberador”(Bolato 2003: 136). ‘Cuando adolescente hubicea querido ser judo, olehevique, negro, homosexual, drogadicto y medio loco, y manco para mas remate, pero s6lo fui profesor de literatura’ (Bolaio 2012: 127). 418. ‘constantemente amenazada [|] por a conciencia de la enfermedad fisica, pero también por la enfermedad moral de una época” 16, 17. REFERENCES Bates, V. and Goodman, S. (2014) ‘Introduction’. In: V. Bates, A. Bleakley, and 8. Goodman (eds.), Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches 10 the Medical