[The sick child in modern literature]

The relationship between literature and medicine consists of many dimensions and has a long tradition--from antiquity up to the present, medicine itself has a literary or artistic nature, is both "art" (ars) and "science" (scientia), combines natural sciences and humanities. The whole world of medicine has been represented in literary texts. Literature has often taken the disease and therapy of children as their subject. These representations can be classified in eight dimensions: 1. pathophenomenology, 2. etiology, 3. subjectivity of the patient, 4. image of the physician, 5. diagnostics and therapy, 6. medical institution, 7. social reactions, 8. symbolism. Sickness and health of the child, in their natural and cultural breadth, remind medicine of its fundamentally scientific and humanistic nature. Health and disease are concerned with life and death, and are closely connected to the physical, social, psychic, and spiritual nature of humans.