Anatomska zbirka pisca / Anatomy Collection of a Writer

Slika medicine u romanu Čovjek protiv čovjeka Ernsta Weißa / The Portrayal of Medicine in The Novel Mensch Gegen Mensch by Ernst Weiss

Abstract

In his novel Mensch gegen Mensch (1919), the Austrian writer Ernst Weiß opens the door to the figure of a doctor for the first time. The diseases that Weiß works with here are not only the fruit of the “writer’s imagination” but almost clearly mapped images from the conventional medicine books as well as the very experiences that Weiß acquired during his education and later practice as a surgeon in Vienna and Prague. In the novel Mensch gegen Mensch, the writer introduces the hero Alfred to the world of the Second Viennese Medical School, which on the one hand stands in the service of humans, and on the other excludes all that is not material: sensitivity and ultimately the very “soul”. While the clinical view focuses on the human body as the subject of research, the literary text puts humans at the centre of events and tries to expose what is invisible to the naked eye: the human psyche. Questions arise as to how Weiß portrays the early 20th-century medical discourse in the novel and what role he attributes to medicine in the research and understanding of a human.