Parole della scienza vs parole della natura. Medicina e società nel racconto Die Genesung (1822)

The aim of this article is to highlight how the use of medical terminology in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s last short story reveals the ambivalence between nature and bourgeois society and the failure of mesmerism as a tool for effective healing. The medical language used as well as magnetic practices exert a real physical and mental manipulation on the subject to bring him again into a bourgeois ‘normality’. This manipulative medical language clashes with the “weak” language of the patient, i.e., a language of the body, linked to the totality of the human being as part of nature. The fake healing happens in the presence of a « wunderlicher Baum » as a reference to that principle of reunification with the Whole, learned by the author through Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert’s theories. The intimate aspiration of the patient fails, and the reader witnesses the death of natural language due to the supremacy of scientific language. Therefore, Hoffmann’s last short story becomes both a place of confrontation between different kinds of knowledge of the time and a critique of society. Within this realm, the literary text becomes a privileged form of meta-representation of knowledge about the human being and his states of consciousness.