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The work analyses the complex relationship between mental illnesses and curative medicine in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, highlighting problems deriving from unsuitable practices, and shedding light on the overwhelming, asymmetric relationship between doctor/patient, man/woman. The work analyses the doubling phenomena arising from the diaries, which Hoffmann overcame determined not to fall into madness; moreover, the author highlights Hofmmann's qualities as a man and a scholar, attentive to the limits of therapies, questioning doctors without understanding. The author summarises Hoffmann's ideas on the libertarian approach to illness, which includes the acceptance of the patient in their whole being, and presents his idea of therapy consisting of interpersonal dialogue and of listening to a story which reflects a similar case. The author also suggests the novelty of the "talking cure" method ante litteram, which was then successfully adopted by psychoanalysis: a method full of ideas, fruitful for literature, from Poe to Schnitzler, and for cinema, from Hitchcock to Kubrick.

Therapeutics in literature. --- Animal magnetism in literature. --- Hoffmann, E. T. A. --- Criticism and interpretation.

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An examination of the ways in which late medieval lyric poetry can be seen to engage with contemporary medical theory. This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d'Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoral theory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that according to the theories of love that predominated in the late medieval West foreclosed the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets' circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Julie Singer is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.

French poetry --- Italian poetry --- Blindness in literature. --- Therapeutics in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Blindness. --- French and Italian Poetry. --- Late Medieval Poetry. --- Medical Theory. --- Therapy.