Una literatura de la enfermedad y de la muerte

Abstract

Patients need to transform their disease into a fiction, and their stories, once sorted out following the creative process and captured in a paper, constitute the disease literature. Illness adds countless components to literature and, in turn, literature gives back a mixture of fiction and reality which enriches and comforts. Related to disease and death of loved ones there are many books written and published with several aims (altruism, to understand the fact of being sick, as a resistance mechanism…) and even for professional reasons. Besides, disease divulgation might be accompanied by beneficial effects at social level such as to normalize the illness, to assume death and to favor the patient´s role in a wide sense that includes the promotion of research development and the pressure on treatments reinforcement.