Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia: The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes

It is a commonplace that literature and life intersect in many places. Even without adopting philosophic concepts (the Kantian categories, say, or Cassirer's symbolic forms) as tools for probing facts in various realms of experience, a literary scholarmay point to the derivation ofmany narrative or dramatic episodes and plots from actual cases: moral, judicial, and medical. But derivation certainly does not imply primacy ofimportance of the source, i.e., if we study the interplay of disciplines in actual casus, reciprocal fertilization between disciplines is more apparent than mere debt. Indeed, if we pursue the Renaissance thinking about one kind of medical case, namely what we would now call schizophrenia, and particularly the delusions associated with it, Francis Bacon seems to have been right for that period when he said pointedly that "Medicine is a Science, which hath been . . . more professed, than laboured, and yetmore laboured, than advanced."^ While some cases of psychoses and some minimal classification of them have their firm place in disquisitions on "melancholy" from the earliest medical authors onwards, it seems that such cases needed sympathetic penetration by thinkers outside the medical academy for the full extent of suffering in them to be reaUzed perhaps an analogue to recent impulses the treatment of psychotics has received fi-om a movement sometimes called "anti-psychiatry."^ In our period the troubled mind will derive not only insight but sustenance from the sympathetic account ofschizophrenia in abook like R. D. Laing's The Divided Self. Describing the exaggerated desire for privacy and the acute sense ofvulnerability in these patients, Laing points out that