20.07.2024

IL PIETRISCO JOURNAL, Issue 2 (December 2025), Call for articles:*Facets of the Health Humanities*

The Learned Online Journal IL PIETRISCO – Poetry – Prose – Cinema,
invites article for its Second Issue (December 2025)

(Leonardo Da Vinci, Anatomie, 1510)

“There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.” (Kalanithi, 2016, p. 39) Thus does American physician Paul Kalanithi in When Breath Becomes Air hypothesise a powerful correspondence of the biological language of the human body, the very functioning and orchestration of its vital processes, and his attempt to find a narrative voice to linguistically and artistically record and recount one’s subjective experience of life with its repertoire of feelings, needs and challenges. His work, completed by his wife Lucy after his death, moves between three main phases of the author’s path through his terminal illness and poetically traces a journey of endurance, hope and legacy — a true phenomenology of his experience of writing his way through terminal illness.  Whilst Kalanithi’s literary exploration shows the strength of auto-pathography written in prose, in a parallel manner another author, the English poet Myra Schneider, shows the efficacy of using an autopathography written in verse. [Read More…]