English Language Broadcast - Ilness's arrival in literature and medical humanities - 27/07/24

English Language Broadcast

"Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid ; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions- literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind."

These are words written by Virginia Woolf in 1926, from her essay On Being Ill. In this essay, the American author ponders on the absence of the theme of illness in literature. But this is an absence that is slowly being filled, especially over the course of the past century. Dr. Isabel Durán of the Complutense University in Madrid is an expert in the representation of illness in literature and media, which is quite the recent phenomenon. We will be discussing about why there has been this shift in the arts, and in our way of thinking about illness.

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