Pain-has an Element of Blank-It cannot recollectWhen it begun-or if there wereA time when it was not--Emily Dickinson, Poem 650I know the feeling now, when I can't spina sentence and sit mumbling and turning;and nothing flits by my brain, which is asa blank window.-Virginia Woolf, Diary of Virginia WoolfWhat is the relationship between art and illness? For centuries visual arts have played an important role in the portrayal of the sick, from Rembrandt's famous Lesson1-to which Philip Roth's title obviously alludes- to Munch's The Sick Child. What can art convey about the human body, the relationship between doctors and patients, or the representation of illness? Artists have tackled the subject of illness in various ways, from line drawings to vivid portrayals of this intimate experience. Classical and modern literature is replete with characters presenting neurological, cognitive, psychiatric, or other medical conditions. Dostoyevsky's fiction, for example, abounds in details of the epilepsy from which he was suffering. Prince Myshkin in the novel Idiot is one of the best known epileptic figures in literature. An earlier example is John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), an exploration of his illness-believed to be typhus-and the spiritual journey it entailed. At times, authors of literature come to describe diseases even before they are identified by medical science. One of the best accounts of acutely progressing strokes, for instance, is in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the disease of the narrator's grandmother remaining to this day piece of anthology (Bogousslavsky, Marcel Proust par. 1). Shakespeare's plays display various neurological and psychiatric cases. Balzac wrote in his novel Louis Lambert what could probably be considered the first accurate report of schizophrenia, decades before Kraepelin and Bleuler's first medical diagnoses of this disorder.2In her 1926 celebrated essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf argued, however, that the drama of the diseased body ought to preoccupy writers more than the ravages of war:Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions [...] literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. (4)Sixty years later, Philip Roth was taking a similar stance, claiming that modern authors of fiction had displayed great reticence about the subject of the body, and more particularly, the body shaped by illness, old age, or death: When I was writing Anatomy Lesson I made a list of novels about illness and disease. It was a short list. Cancer Ward and Magic Mountain. If you want to stretch it, you can toss in Malone Dies. There is no great body of literature on this strain of misery. Astonishing, isn't it? All those great books about adultery and none about diabetes (Searles 140). Throughout his career, Roth has addressed this particular gap by having his characters voice the story of physical suffering and illness. From his first short stories to his late novels, his work revolves around themes such as sexuality, desire, and manhood, but also addresses the body shaped by illness, old age, and death. At the same time, Roth's body of work-in particular Anatomy Lesson-constitutes a criticism of today's medical culture while it also strives to connect Western biomedicine with the patient's own (non-medical) understanding and experience of pain.Despite the presence of numerous literary texts dealing with medicine, few have had pain and illness at their core. subject of physical suffering has been for too long treated rather peripherally. …