Explore the fascinating intersection of art and medicine through paintings, illustrations, and visual representations of physicians, medical procedures, and healthcare throughout history.
Listening to an invisible organ Long before it was an image, a pressure curve, an electrical trace or a stream of numbers on a monitor, the heart was a sound. For centuries a physician had two options: feel the pulse at the wrist, or put an ear against the patient’s chest, with all the awkwardness … Read more
Narrative medicine transforms clinical practice through close reading and reflective writing. A comprehensive guide for physicians and researchers, from Rita Charon’s Columbia programme to Oliver Sacks, Tolstoy, and Jerome Groopman.
I went back to the Odyssey when Nolan’s film came out, for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine. I did not get far. Book I stopped me. Odysseus, we are told almost in passing, once sailed to Ephyra to find a man named Ilus, son of Mermerus, and to ask him for a … Read more
SummaryDante Alighieri’s Inferno is a theological poem, yes, but it is also, almost incidentally, a forensic catalogue of medieval disease and healthcare. This article reads the poem through the lens of medical history: how Dante represents specific pathologies (dropsy, scabies and possibly leprosy, neurological deformity, hypothermia, traumatic mutism), how he mimics diagnostic observation, and how … Read more
I am a cardiac surgeon. My work is rooted in the operating room, in clinical decisions, and in the care of individual patients. At the same time, I have become deeply interested in medical data, statistics, coding, and artificial intelligence. My fascination with the history of medicine, however, has remained just as strong. At first … Read more
Doctor Zhivago turns the daily work of a physician into a lens for what care becomes when institutions break. War medicine, infectious disease, rural scarcity. Through these threads Pasternak delivers a lesson that still cuts close to contemporary, technology-driven healthcare: clinical judgment and ethical independence carry the most weight precisely when the system around them … Read more
The Anatomy of Suffering: Frida Kahlo through the Lens of Medical History Introduction: Why Frida Kahlo is the Patron Saint of Narrative Medicine In the intersection of art and clinical science, few figures loom as large as Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). While often celebrated for her surrealist aesthetics and her role in Mexican Modernism, Kahlo’s work … Read more
“Sickness, madness and death were the dark angels that had accompanied me since childhood.” Edvard Munch, Diaries, 1890 In the cold north of Europe, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Norwegian painter transformed his pain into vision. Not abstract pain, but one rooted in flesh, lungs, and nerves: a pain named tuberculosis, … Read more
Introduction Haruki Murakami is one of the most significant contemporary Japanese novelists. While he never directly addresses medicine in his works, health-related themes frequently appear as metaphors. In his writing, the body and its lived experiences are consistently connected to trauma, memory, and the unconscious. These connections extend into fantastic, paranormal, and cosmological dimensions, transforming … Read more
The Death of the Grandmother: A Moment of Truth, Fragility, and Revelation Introduction In the third volume of “À la recherche du temps perdu”, Marcel Proust portrays the gradual illness and death of the narrator’s grandmother. This episode stands as one of the emotional, philosophical, and narrative pinnacles of the entire work. Through his meticulous … Read more