Microbes

Diego Vecchio

NOVEL. BEATRIZ VITERBO, 2006. 192 PAGES.

In 1768, Samuel Auguste Tissot, a doctor and confidante of Rousseau, the author of famous treatise on onanism, published another entitled The Health of the Men of Letters, in which he tried to demonstrate through a series of rather horrifying case studies that literature is like masturbation: a practice insidious to the health of those who indulge in it in public or private.
This prejudice, now happily consigned to the past, reminds us of something we often forget: literature is a body that writes. That is why writers are such vulnerable creatures. Certain books arose as side-effects of anaemia, asthma, dyspepsia, haemorrhoids, kidney stones and syphilis. Before it was a science, medicine was the art of putting a name to pain.
Microbes features nine clinical case studies, a Vademecum of diseases produced by literature, an anatomical museum of bodies of letters, constellations of humours and tremors. When one starts to write, their organs begin to chatter like washerwomen airing out their dirty sheets by the river.

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish BEATRIZ VITERBO | Brazil COSAC NAIFY | France L'ARBRE VENGEUR

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