„Życie bywa chorobą”. Zdrowie, choroba i miłość w listach Felicjana Medarda Faleńskiego do Marii Trębickiej (1854–1861)

Abstract

The material, considered as a cultural text, a historical source, and a specific literary genre, comes from 77 letters by Felicjan Medard Faleński to Maria Trębicka, preserved in their unpublished engagement correspondence (MS BJ 5780). An inseparable part of the poet’s epistolography are references to illnesses – both physical ailments (headache, cold, influenza, fever, whooping cough, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis – an object of linguistic taboo) and mental disorders (depression, nervous breakdowns, “madness”). Faleński also reflects on his attitude toward physicians and the therapies practiced at the time: drinking mineral waters, travelling for climate change, hydropathy, and homeopathy according to the concept of Christian Samuel Hahnemann. His first reaction is mockery and skepticism; he approves fashionable medical methods only on the basis of personal experience and believes in prevention rather than in treatment. Frequent expressions of concern and anxiety about another’s health occupy an important place in the dynamics of the emotional relations described in the letters – they serve as proof of strong feelings toward his fiancée, relatives, and friends. The concepts of health, therapy, and illness in the “private world” of a nineteenth-century writer are also used metaphorically, as a way of speaking about emotions (Maria is for Felicjan “the deaf man’s trumpet”, while her letters are the best medicine), and, finally, about the literature and culture of his epoch.