This book presents the materials of the International conference Medicine and Russian Literature, held October 9–11, 2003, at the Slavic Department of the Konstanz University (Germany). It is devoted to the coexistence of belles-lettres and medicine: the role of literary rhetoric in the representations of medical topics and the influence of medicine on the rhetorical and textual technique of artistic creation. The contributors (literary critics and historians) focus on the representation of medical knowledge in Russian literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century; the rhetoric and narrative structures of medical discourse; the aesthetic problems of bodily deviance and canon; the communication models and the forms of medical and literary ‘therapy’, thematized in textbook exemplars and unknown texts on the relationship between the doctors and their ‘reading’ patients.