Hallowen Costumes With Crutches

The flag number six, The Alienist and The Hospital of the Transfiguration's Workshop Blog

have recently fallen into my hands three books, geography and ancient times, which, however, beyond a superficial reading, messages containing essentially overlap.

Tsarist Russia, colonial Brazil in the late nineteenth and early months of World War II in Poland, are the scenarios in which framed the experiences of three men engaged in psychiatry in environments oppressive and unjust, which end up being an essential part of their own processes of transformation.

But one thing ...

Ward No 6 is a narrative written in 1892 by A. Chekhov. The aforementioned flag is the dilapidated building and a miserable rural hospital which is home to rare wild with the village.

The narrative takes us into the routine and hopeless life of Dr. Andrei Efímich Raguin and its relationship with Ivan Dmitrievitch, held in the psychiatric ward number six is \u200b\u200bsuffering from a persecution mania, with the arrogant and brutal Nikita, keep the flag, and some of his countrymen and contemporaries.

The main character, stoic philosophy-loving intellectual, missing the existence of anxiety in people and believes that the society we live in is sad and penniless. Only one person will be able to dazzle you with his eloquence and fascinating view of life: Ivan Dmitrievitch, one of the inmates in this inhospitable place.

The outcome of story is announced by a leading doctor stark sentence: " My illness is just that in 20 years I found more than a smart person in the whole town, and this is a lunatic."

The author ends the story with a disturbing but inescapable final and loyal to the plot: " Now everything, even the genuine interest of my friends dragged me to one thing only: to my doom. This is the final and I have the courage to admit it. "

The Alienist by Machado de Assis is not only a fun book, besides possessing a subtle humor and clever satire of the genre scene of nineteenth-century colonial Brazil, but a brilliant metaphor for many of the absurdities of psychiatry, confusions and miseries. This story shows in its few pages a summary of the main concerns are not externalized Machado de Assis: identity, the separation between normal and abnormal, the struggles and political overtones, the marriage relationship, friendship, social concerns money, status.

's work in its central line, it is graceful and simple: a Brazilian doctor, graduated in Lisbon rejects the proposals of being a doctor of the court or a university professor to return to his hometown and to engage in scientific study and experimentation. His specialty is psychiatry. In order to study and remedy the ills of madness, a mental construct, Casa Verde, in the most beautiful street Itaguaí and fifty windows are opened, painted green on each side of the building. With the grant of the City and payment of boarding wealthy, began the great work begins, as expected, with the detention of any person acting out any sign of abnormality. These limits are extended and there comes a time when virtually the entire population should be hospitalized. Hence, the psychiatrist, the sage Bacamarte Simão, concludes that the abnormal is normal, and releases the first intern crazy to sane cases. The ending left it in the air, but what else could make all collapsed Simao saw his theories?

HOSPITAL The Transfiguration is the first novel by Stanislaw Lem, unpublished until now in Castilian, a devastating piece about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Completed in Krakow in September 1948 and set in the early months of the invasion of Poland by the Nazis, The Hospital of the Transfiguration tells the story of Stefan Trzyniecki, a young doctor who finds employment in a psychiatric hospital located in a remote forest, a place that seems "out of the world." But little by little, madness is leaking outside the walls of the hospital. A series of sadistic doctors, co-Trzyniecki, atrocious experiments are given to the mentally ill in the facility, while the Nazis, who combed the woods in search of partisans, decided to convert the hospital in an SS hospital. Lem, one of the undisputed masters of twentieth century European fiction, this novel evokes all that is monstrous in the human spirit

In the Throughout this story, the protagonist, through contact with various characters, like the beautiful and mysterious Dr. Nosilewska or Sekulowski poet, began an accelerated learning vital reminiscent of the protagonist of The Magic Mountain, Mann. But when the SS troops pursuing a partisan approach to hospital events are a cruel twist ...
Sekulowski says in one of his long talks with the doctor:
"- do not know more about our body on the star more distant, "the poet whispered.
" Come to know the laws that govern ...
"And it turns out that most of the biological theory have their antithesis. Scientific theories are a true psychic gum.

Apart from the enjoyment of these three readings, I'll stick with these and other questions:
- where is the boundary between the different and pathologically different?
- Who put that line?
- science is omnipotent? we are professionals?
- what we improved in the field of mental health and what remnants of last drag?
- have we made so much progress as we strive in evidence?
- are the errors and injustices of the past an issue settled?

Text by Esther Sanz (Clinical Psychologist Mental Health External Area Tenerife).
Much of the data for this entry have been collected items Lizardo Cross, author of the blog From the insane asylum. From here my appreciation for their work and a greeting. We await your prompt return to the blogosphere.