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Memorias literarias de la difteria: Mark Twain, W.G. Sebald y el síndrome de Stendhal

2013; SciELO; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4067/s0716-10182013000100018

0717-6341

Walter Ledermann,

Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig

Memories of W.G. Sebald from the diphtheria he suffered as a child, gave rise to a discussion about the origin of classic clinical descriptions and the traps memory tends.Good examples of the latter are some experiences of Stendhal, who must also be distrusted given his hypersensitivity, which gave name to a psychosomatic syndrome.Mark Twain, a more practical man, brings us back to reality with a funny story about the terror the disease caused in the late nineteenth century.This leads us to remember isolation measures and topical treatments from the period immediately preceding the antitoxin.They included manual removal of the pseudo membranes, maneuver that led Marañón to misinterpret a painting by Goya on a scene of "Lazarillo de Tormes".