1: Galen Through The Lens of Cioran
Unfamiliar with Ceronetti's work, I discovered this text through a reference to it in E.M. Cioran's ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS. It seemed worth checking out, since a.) he was keeping company with profiles of Borges and Beckett, always a good indicator, and, b.) the slip of information that Cioran wrote seemed to suggest that the author was perhaps more pessimistic than Cioran, which I had to see to believe. Anyway, this is something like a gloss of medical history for the past few thousand years, viewed with a very grim and gimlet eye and with a focus on the less pleasant aspects of the bodily experience. The selections are generally as pithy as Cioran and sometimes as vicious, but all in all Ceronetti seems a bit more even-tempered. Nonetheless, for fans of the Rochefoucauld/Nietzsche/Cioran school of merciless epigrams, this is strongly recommended.
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