Satiirikon lääkärikirja

sairaus latinankielisen satiirin moraalikritiikissä

• Sari Kivistö

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74656

Abstract

The satirist's medical book: Disease imagery and moral criticism in Latin satire

Satirists have often applied medical and bodily imagery in their art of moral castigation. The tradition of Latin satire is filled with images where the satirist acts like a medical doctor to reveal the patient's real, corrupted and diseased nature. Physical and moral sicknesses are often paralleled in Latin satire; physical illnesses are represented as symptoms of a moral failure and indices of the sick human condition. This article examines how medical terms were important in constructing moral criticism and how physical symptoms conveyed moral values in the genre. It focuses on two specific pathological symptoms (hidden wounds and paleness) and two sensory defects (deafness and blindness). Hidden wounds and pallor are metaphors of latent diseases and the sick soul, whereas blindness and deafness are more ambivalent. The emphasis of the discussion is on Roman verse satire (i.e, Horace, Persius and Juvenal), which established an imagery that was then adopted and further developed by later Latin satirists. The article concludes with a short account of two parodic disease eulogies from the seventeenth century, Marten Schoock's In Praise of Deafness (Surditatis encoruiurn) and Jakob Guther's Teiresias, or, In Praise of Blindness (Tiresias seu caecitatis encomium).