La medicina en la obra literaria de José Luis Sampedro

Abstract

José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013) was a Spanish economist who wrote literary works since his youth, although the public success did not reach him until his maturity. His father was physician and Sampedro himself was interested in becoming medical doctor during a time. Many of his literary works contain references to medicine and physiology, especially two of them, La sonrisa etrusca (1985) and Monte Sinaí (1995). In the first, Sampedro analyzed the effects of a severe disease in an elderly man, and how his illness experience is modulated by his grandson. In the second, he described his stay in the Mount Sinai Hospital after a severe endocarditis that threatened his life. The narrative shows the emotions associated with the vital threaten and how the human contact relieved them. This paper analyzes these two literary works but also some of the other novels and autobiographical works.