Illness and Literature in the Low Countries

Book excerpt: From as early as classical antiquity there has been an interplay between literature and medicine. The first book of Homer's Ilias recounts the plague that swept the camp of the Achaeans. While this instance concerns a full-length book, it is the aphorism that is of greater importance as a literary technique for the dissemination of medical knowledge, from the "Corpus Hippocraticum" of antiquity until the "Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis" (1715) by Herman Boerhaave. In addition, the subject of illness and its impact on mankind was explored by great numbers of poetic scholars and scholarly poets.This collection offers fourteen articles which all highlight the relation between disease and literature. It entails a first-ever overview of Dutch-language research in this field, whereby the literary and cultural functions of medical knowledge and the poetics of medical and literary writing are in the focus.