Bibliotherapy

I would hesitate to cite George Eliot and John Cross in favor of anything, except possibly demonstrating the pitfall of marrying someone much younger than you while you're still mourning your ex-spouse.

Perhaps the most convincing argument for the effectiveness of bibliotherapy comes from writers themselves. There's the case of George Eliot, for example, who recovered from the grief of losing her husband George Henry Lewes by reading Dante with a young friend, John Cross, who subsequently married her. "Her sympathetic delight in stimulating my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante did something to distract her mind from sorrowful memories," Cross later wrote. "The divine poet took us to a new world. It was a renovation of life."

Nonetheless, the rest of this article makes for interesting reading. The Guardian:

The image has a hint of homeopathy about it - like curing like - and just as homeopathy is regarded with suspicion in conventional medicine, so bibliotherapy is bound to strike sceptics as a form of quack medicine. But considerable research has been carried out over the past 20 years which seeks to prove the healing capacity of the arts in general and literature in particular. A study in Alabama demonstrated how depressives treated via bibliotherapy had less chance of relapse than those given medication. At Kings College, London, Gillie Bolton has explored the use of writing with a range of palliative care patients and teenage cancer sufferers. Other studies have explored the links between involvement in the arts and longevity; between "verbally revealing it all" and fighting off infections; between the generally calming effect of books - relatively few of which are so bad that we want to hurl them across the room and - and lower levels of cardio- vascular disease. An Arts Council report of 2004 cited 385 references from medical research on the positive effect of the arts and humanities in healthcare, among them "inducing positive physiological and psychological changes in clinical outcomes, reducing drug consumption, shortening length of stay in hospital ... and developing health practitioners' empathy".

The scientific evidence is far from conclusive, nevertheless. Raymond Tallis, author and emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at University of Manchester, has been enormously impressed by Jane Davis's work, but notes that most of the published research "consists of equivocal findings in fourth-rank journals", adding: "I have been a medic too long to be easily persuaded of the wider role of literature in healing. No one sends out for a poet when they are seriously ill." However, even he concedes that "my last boss before I became a consultant was hugely helped in his last weeks by reading War and Peace, when he was attached to a diamorphine pump." Tallis also acknowledges that reading might be therapeutic in a variety of ways, not least in easing depression: "the pleasure of escape into a parallel world; the sense of control one has as a reader; and the ability to distance one's self from one's own circumstances by seeing them from without, suffered by someone else and gathered up into a nicely worked-out plot - somewhere around here is the notion of the Aristotelian purgation and Sartre's idea of 'the purifying reflection'."

Comments

[Daniel]

Ever read The Puttermesser Papers (or something titled close to that) by Cynthia Ozick? George Eliot's ghost, so to speak, is a major influence in parts.

[Gwendolyn Dawson]

Interesting. Along these lines, I've read Jane Austen was recommended reading in World War I hospitals for severely shell-shocked soldiers. I guess all the drawing room conversations, balls, and marriage plots have a calming influence.