“By disrupting everyday life, the disease drives us out of ourselves, it abandons us.” So begins Luis Jorge Boone’s book: secret room (Ciruela, 2022). The original purpose of this article was to treat disease as a story, i.e. to analyze the narrative dimension of pathology. In my opinion, the author continues Virginia Woolf’s famous 1926 book edited by TS Eliot: I got sick. The author argues that when one thinks about the impact of disease on our lives, it becomes strange that “disease does not occupy a place in literature next to love, war, and jealousy. One might think that there are novels devoted to influenza , wrote odes to pneumonia, and lyric poems to toothache. But this is not the case, says Woolf, who regrets the lack of language in the face of illness. Any word can describe a cold or a migraine; language only goes in one direction. The purest schoolgirl in love has Shakespeare and Keats speaking for her; but if the patient describes his headache to the doctor, the words are instantly lost.
I got sickde Woolf, It appears to be a protest against literature’s indifference in the face of the phenomenological complexities of illness. In his writings, the line between physical and mental becomes blurred: pain is both mental and physical at the same time, as it fully affects the state of being. Unlike the testimony narrative, which focuses on autobiography, the English woman relates her oral thoughts: it is a narrative involving reflective states of her consciousness during her illness.exist camera secretLuis Jorge Boone walks these paths and continues to evolve
He reveals an astonishing understanding of the body and pain and is uncommonly able to use verbal cues to put this astonishing understanding on the page.
Boone puts into words an abstract story: the clinical history of consciousness in the face of bodily pain and suffering in general. The first part of the book, “Diagnosis,” deals with the patient’s transition from uncertainty to a progressive conceptualization of pathology, through a diagnostic process that includes medical concepts and repeated experience, making the patient an expert on his or her condition. “The patient longs to get on his knees, seeks a movement that depends on his will, he needs it to feel that his life has not been completely taken away. The diagnosis is the first step in this direction. With it, he can transform himself Put on the map of illness, he can also be put on the map of recovery: he becomes a patient, he no longer ignores himself, but recognizes himself as a foreigner”. The second part of the book, “Battle with Angels,” explores the connection between the body and literature through some contemporary works: The man who mistook his wife for a hatBy: Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks; our dark sidepsychoanalyst Elizabeth Rudinesco; three sided coinPoet Francisco Hernández’s poem, or David Huerta’s poem “Fever”. Through these references, Boone establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue. The third part of the book, titled “A Brief Selection of Evening Love,” resumes the questions raised by Francisco Gonzalez Crusi in “Evening Love.” lovesickness, That is: the analysis of lovesickness. The fourth part of the book, “Black Work”, presents us with “visiting a virtual hospital whose wards are real”.
In that imaginary place we found Sylvia Plath, Roberto Bolaño, Carson McCullers, Thomas Tranströmer, Ricardo Pilly Ya’s clinical history, and Maria Luisa Purja’s trajectory towards her loveliness. Pain Diary. In the “Following Archives” chapter, Boone describes the relationship between a musculoskeletal disorder and the development of his poetic writing.
face the harsh reality When it comes to illness, many of us seek refuge in literature, as if it could bring us comfort when the science of pathology reaches its limits. Let me explain: scientific research is developed over decades; eventually we gain useful knowledge to cure disease and alleviate suffering. However, the clinical realities did not stop there. Clinicians and their patients encounter questions and mysteries every day. Every day we find reasons to engage in moral reflection. Every day someone suffers from unhealed or unexplained pain. In waiting for a solution, many of us—patients, clinicians, scientists, readers, or writers—have turned to literature to make sense of the inevitable, to integrate our pathological experiences with the larger context of our lives stand up. This is how the literary tradition of clinical narrative emerged: it was an artistic endeavor that required the construction of significant meaning.
Some books of this genre lie on the border between scientific report and clinical narrative: there we find Alessandro Luria, Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio and Francisco Gonzalez Crusi. There are testimonial works, such as Gérard de Neval’s seminal work or contemporary works by Martha Linehan, Kay Jamieson or Siri Hustwitt, that reflect on mental illness from traumatic experiences. secret roomLuis Jorge Boone’s book explores a different territory: this book emerges at the limits of poetry and literary prose. Armed with a microscope that magnifies the literary process, Boone examines the birth of metaphors that help us make sense of disturbingly painful experiences.
through their secret roomBoone shows us the intersection of disease, the body, and literature, yielding a multifaceted view of clinical experience that incorporates the perspective of the afflicted. The tradition of clinical storytelling embodies tensions between different perspectives in the field of health, including stories that openly challenge views of medicine. Clinical narratives defend dialogue and pluralism against stereotypes of human experience, reductionist ideologies, market discourse, or authoritarian positions. By stimulating understanding between opposing viewpoints, narrative art may serve to mediate or appease instances.