Background Understanding representations of disease in various art genres provides insights into how patients and health care providers view the diseases. It can also be used to enhance patient... Show moreBackground Understanding representations of disease in various art genres provides insights into how patients and health care providers view the diseases. It can also be used to enhance patient care and stimulate patient self-management. Methods This paper reviews how cardiovascular diseases are represented in novels, films, and paintings: myocardial infarction, aneurysm, hypertension, stroke, heart transplantation, Marfan's disease, congestive heart failure. Various search systems and definitions were used to help identify sources of representations of different cardiovascular diseases. The representations of the different diseases were considered separately. The Common Sense Model was used a theoretical model to outline illness perceptions and self-management in the various identified novels, films, and paintings. Results Myocardial infarction followed by stroke were the most frequently detailed diseases in all three art genres. This reflects their higher prevalence. Representations ranged from biomedical details through to social and psychological consequences of the diseases. Conclusions Artistic representations of cardiovascular diseases reflect cognitions, emotions, and images of prevalent disease. These representations shape views and behaviour of ill and healthy persons regarding heart diseases. As these representations are amenable to change, they deserve further research, which may be instrumental in improving the quality of life of persons struck by cardiovascular diseases. Changing illness perceptions appears to be a method to improve self-management and thereby quality of life in patients with various cardiovascular diseases. Show less
The aim of this thesis is to explore in which way Latin American novels from the last decade of the twentieth century represent urban violence. These novele are: Plata quemada by Ricardo Piglia, La... Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to explore in which way Latin American novels from the last decade of the twentieth century represent urban violence. These novele are: Plata quemada by Ricardo Piglia, La pesquisa by Juan José Saer and La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo. All three display extreme forms of violence. Frequently, this violence seems to position itself at the edge of reason or at least at the edge of what Jacques Lacan would refer to as symbolic order. These novels are urban stories and are constructed according to the pattern of the classical genres of the modern city: the detective, the urban chronicle and the so-called non-fiction. At the core, the novels on violence seem to be telling the same story: the failure of the modern project in Latin America and in any case the decadence of an imaginary, understood as a series of shared images that consolidate the community. There is a decline in them, an adversity, an “anthropological machine” that has finally exhausted itself after a hundred years. The reader is obliged to look again and reconstruct these texts through which he discovers the scandal of everyday violence and history’s hell. Show less