Apanhadores de sensibilidade: narrativas de afeto em humanidades médicas

Abstract

Sensitivity Catchers: Narratives of Affection in Medical Humanities is a beautiful and expressive title, which gives the reader a preview of the result of a training experience, carried out within the scope of the Medicine course at the Federal University of Ceará – UFC, amidst the atmosphere filled with shadows of COVID-19. This is the optional subject Medical Humanities & Attitudes in Professional Life: mediation through literature, cinema and visual arts, an immersive experience in the field of arts, carried out by students from different semesters, from the first to the ninth, all motivated to see how aesthetic language can translate the subtleties of the human individual. The proposal came from Professor Álvaro Madeiro Leite, closely assisted by the book's co-organizer, Gabriel Marques Cavalcante, and had a strong impact on the students, since one hundred and sixty-five of them felt encouraged to explore these forms of artistic language, having as their first reference the idea of ​​medical care for patients. A book of affection. Yes! Even more so when we remember the etymology of the last word, which goes back to the Latin form affectus, past participle of the verb afficere, which means “to touch”, “to move the spirit”. The decipherers of the arcana of our language also state that, by extension, affectus acquired the meaning of “to unite”, “to fix”, also in the sense of becoming ill, hence affection. Thus, the proposal of experience that the doctor, while trying to unravel the labyrinths of pathologies, should keep in mind giving relevance to the notion of sensitive attention to the person, brings with it the expressiveness of this double semantics.