Ailing allegories and sickly stories: the quest for pathology in children's literature

Primary Care and Subspecialty Medicine, WJB Dorn VA Medical Center, Columbia, SC, USA. Brown J McCallum, MD, Physician; Stuart M Smith, MD, Physician. Reprints will not be available from the authors. Correspondence: Dr Brown J McCallum, Primary Care and Subspecialty Medicine, WJB Dorn VA Medical Center, 6439 Garner’s Ferry Road, Columbia, SC 29209, USA. Brown.mccallum@med.va.gov The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 5/19 December 2005 183 11/12 670-671 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2005 www.mja.com.au Christmas Offerings In fact, it is well described. In Chapter 2 of Winnie t becomes lodged firmly in the doorway of his f house as a direct result of his generous girth. Does have true truncal obesity? To test this theory, we classic Pooh doll belonging to one of our da waistline measurement was found to be 37 cm; th ference was 38.5 cm. This gives a waist to hip ratio he ch is T presumption that fictional aracters may have real diseases nothing new. The description of mental illness is a constant feature in literary criticism, and with increasing frequency, descriptions of physical afflictions suffered by literary characters have been showing up in the medical literature. Various characters have even lent their names to medical syndromes — who doesn’t know that Pickwickian Syndrome derives its name from a character in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers or that the Lilliputian Syndrome derives its name from the land of little people in Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels?1 However, characters in children’s literature have been less well examined for physical maladies. Save for a recent article on head trauma in nursery rhymes, this area seems largely unexplored. We propose that children’s literature provides a wealth of descriptions of disease states; one only has to look. Consider the following as examples.