This past week, Yanneck Wiegers presented his research at the annual meeting of CAMWS Southern Section, which was hosted this year at the University of Texas at San Antonio. On Oct. 24th, Yanneck delivered a paper titled ‘Writers and their Doctors,’ which expands on his PhD research on conceptualizations of literary creativity in Roman literature, combining it with his interests in ancient science and medicine. The abstract follows below; congratulations, Yanneck!
‘Writers and their Doctors’
Throughout ancient literature we find passages that link writers with special physical constitutions or medical conditions. In this talk, Yanneck Wiegers put various of these passages (by Celsus, Suetonius, Quintilian, Pliny, Horace, Vergil, and Aristotle) into conversation and offered some thoughts on their underlying connections. These reveal how medical thought and literary theory intersected specifically in Roman society, where literary creativity was often conceptualized as a physical, even visceral, process. This view stands in stark contrast to many later interpretations (particularly by the influential Romantic movement) that perceived Roman artistic production as largely mechanical, thereby setting it against an idealized Greek mode of creation.