Thursday, October 27, 2022
Illness in The Tale of Genji
I am still working my way through the Tale of Genji: audiobook at Librivox.
two problems: One, I keep falling asleep durng the audiobook so had to read it. And I keep getting the characters mixed up.
But at one point, Genji has malaria and goes to a famous Buddhist priest for treatment. And another character was noted to have malaria too. So now I am planning to do research into medical practice in early Medieval Japan.
Luckily for me, some papers are available on academic sits or on Scribd (since there is no way I can afford to buy them).
I downloaded Doris Bargan's book A Woman's Weapon that discusses how the various women who suffered illness from spirit possession were treated and went into the psychosocial approach to their exorcism. Quite interesting.
But although it is rare to see such hysteria/conversion reactions in the US where being emotional is allowed, I did see this in Africa and a few times in the USA, and of course Freud treated some of these women.
Altough I must disagree with one spirit possession leading to death: I suspect Yugao (and Genji) had food poisoning or something similar, since she died but he got sick and it took a couple of months to get over it. And his wife's spirit possession might have been psychological, but she probably died of childbed fever.
Of course I might be missing something: I completely missed that Anna Karanina's emotional destruction was probably not due to social taboos, but because she was treated with opioids for her nearly fatal childbed fever, and her actions afterward seem to be that of an unstable addict (complete personality change).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment