The plague.

Abstract

Henry E. Sigerist (1) says "since illness is an experience for the patient, the artist, who is the most sensitive of men and recreates his experiences in his works, must of necessity react vigorously to illness". He brings up Mozart's musical fecundity in relation to his pulmonary tuberculosis and his conviction of short life, which would be extinguished after writing the Requiem; the pictorial subject matter of Watteau, also tubercular, who had a preference for scenes of social life, games and the militia, a life he knew he could not enjoy (he died at 37); and also that of Van Gogh affected by psychosis. "Illness has been used," says Sigerist elsewhere, "in many great literary works, either in the development of the plot or to characterize a given situation. Since the writer is not a physician and writes for laymen, he does not describe strange diseases known only to specialists, but those known to all" (10). He chooses then by two factors: the epoch in which he lives and the end he pursues. This fitting observation of the great historian of medicine can be perfectly applied to the work of the French writer and Nobel Prize winner (born in Algeria) Albert Camus, also a tubercular patient, and particularly to his novel The Plague, published in first edition in 1947, where both the era and the end pursued are conjugated.