Foretelling pathology: The poetics of prognosis

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880-1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel. Copyright © SAGE Publications.

A pathology of the animal spirits - the clinical neurology of Thomas Willis (1621-1675) Part I - Background, and disorders of intrinsically normal animal spirits

Thomas Willis (1621-1675), author of the classical work Cerebri Anatome (1664), was arguably the father of the modem era of neurology. As compared with his neuroanatomy, relatively little attention has been paid to Willis' clinical neurology, as described in his Pathologiae Cerebri (1667) and Do Anima Brutorum (1672), where he gave a structured account of disease of the nervous system as it was known in his day. His account was largely derived from personal observations and not from traditional authorities and was based around his concept of the animal spirits, a fictitious entity in many ways analogous to the present day idea of the nerve impulse. This concept allowed him to develop a pathology of the animal spirits which embraced the whole content of the clinical neurology and psychiatry of his times. The anatomical and physiological background to Willis! concepts of animal spirit dysfunction, and those disorders he regarded as due to disturbed function of intrinsically normal animal spirits (mainly headache, disorders of consciousness, apoplexy and palsy) are dealt with in the present paper. The disorders he attributed to inherently abnormal animal spirits are considered in a second part of the paper. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All eights reserved.