ABSTRACT
The outbreak of COVID-19 can be associated with cardiac and pulmonary involvement and is emerging as one of the most significant and life-threatening complications in patients with kidney failure receiving hemodialysis. Here, we report a critically ill case of a 13-year-old female patient with acute pericarditis and bilateral pleurisy, screened positive for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR, presented with high fever, frequent dry cough, and dyspnea with tachypnea. COVID-19-induced myopericarditis has been noted to be a complication in patients with concomitant kidney failure with replacement therapy (KFRT). This article brings information in the light of our case experience, suggesting that the direct effect of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection on cardiac tissue was a significant contributor to myopericarditis in our patient. Further studies in this direction are required, as such associations have thus far been reported.
ABSTRACT
In this paper I briefly visit three cardiac pathologies: syncope, as defined by Aretaeus of Cappadoccia, cardiaca passio (heart disease), as discussed by Caelius Aurelianus, and mal d'amor (lovesickness), as presented in the medieval "Roman d'Eneas". Using the theoretical perspective drawn by recent studies in situated cognition, I argue that these context-specific interpretations attest different modes of tackling a resilient, unruly, problematic, and the difficulty of pinning down the pathological manifestations in a definitive formula, or concept.
ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1380) writes emotions as corporeal events unfolding as specific sensorimotor, cognitive actions, which, in particular cases, may develop pathological offshoots. This paper explores the unstable, organic quality of the emotional phenomenon, and its fluid formal potential. Indeed, while emotion resists definitive categorical and conceptual containment, it must be named, made sense of, thus signalling the power of corporeity to shape language and thought. Crucially, this allows us to measure the importance of cognitive and epistemological modes we activate with the purpose of grasping emotion as irreducible aspect of the human. In this sense, poetic expression emerges as a necessity: through continuous actualisation of its formal plasticity, literature enables the provisory encoding and circulation of emotional phenomena, by exploring the interface between a perceiving body and its phenomenal environment, while allowing for the emergence of new modes of thinking. I proceed to a transepistemic examination of the text in question, by means of historically-informed conceptual tools, beyond the inappropriate categorical dissonances between body and mind, affect and intellect, philosophy, literature, and science.