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Introduction: Literature has always been attracted to neurological pathologies and the numerous works published on the subject are proof of this. Likewise, a number of physicians have been fiction writers and have drawn on their scientific knowledge to help develop their stories., Aims: The study addresses the appearance of neurological pathologies in a sample of literary works and examines the description of the disease, its treatment, the patient's view and the relationship between healthcare professionals and the socio-familial milieu., Development: We review some of the greatest literary works of all times that deal with neurological pathologies, such as Don Quixote, Julius Caesar, David Copperfield, The Idiot or Miau, and many of them are seen to offer a very faithful portrayal of the disease. Similarly, we have also reviewed works that provide a personal account of life with neurological diseases and the ensuing disability written either by the patients themselves or by their relatives, examples being The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, My Left Foot or One Chance in a Thousand., Conclusions: Literature has helped to offer a realistic vision of neurologically-based pathologies and the healthcare professionals who work with them; there are many examples that portray the experiences of the patients themselves and the importance of support from the family is a feature that is constantly underlined.

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income and unemployment have been the main dimensions considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by inter-personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypotheses on two measures of subjective well-being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same condition. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people's health status serves as a benchmark to assess one's own health condition.

This introduction proceeds in five steps. First, it briefly considers the etymology of the term "suffering," as well as the way in which scholars from different disciplines have approached it conceptually and empirically. Second, drawing on the contributions to this issue, it raises general themes emerging from the study of the Thirty Years, Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, with particular attention to gender, the disabled, and Jewish-German veterans. Finally, it considers the most politically contested field of German suffering - the Second World War - and reflects on how that suffering can be narrated and understood without running into the intellectual dead ends of either self-pity or collective guilt.

In this brief history, the authors have attempted to highlight salient aspects of psychotherapy with physically disabled individuals across a span ranging from the prepsychoanalytic to the contemporary. Particular attention is given to the prepsychoanalytic work of Charcot and Janet on neurological diseases and trauma, respectively. Psychoanalytic concepts are reviewed as they relate to physical disability and they are compared with contemporary themes involving trauma and loss. The paper has a distinctly psychoanalytic bias about the psychology of congenital and acquired physical differences. Important to the psychotherapist is the fact that these individuals who happen to have physical disabilities bring to the clinical situation the same kinds of problems, defenses, and adaptations as do so-called "ordinary people." There are some important differences in focus between those whose physical differences are congenital and those who acquire physical disability later in life. However, for the most part, the principles and practice of psychotherapy with the physically disabled are no different from those for any other human being.

Al-Jāhiz, an Arab writer and philosopher of the ninth century C.E., one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the Abbasid period, suggested in his work "Kitāb al-Bursān wa'l-'urjān wa'l-umyān wa'l-hulan" ("The Book of the lepers, lame, blind, and cross-eyed") that disease and physical imperfections should not be considered to be social stigma, but rather signs of special divine blessings. Cripples and sick persons, in his opinion, received spiritual compensation from G-d. This idea may not seem at first glance to belong to medieval Islamic tradition. This paper tries to analyze its place in that culture and its relation to other views on disease accepted there. I will especially try to analyze the correlation between piety and disease: Was it specific to this case or characteristic of the society. The problem of the association of disease and piety and divine favor, the problems of the moral implications of disease in general is certainly a vast one. This study is restricted to some of the ethical conceptions connected with illness in medieval Moslem society, including the religious minorities which were in a sense an integral part of that society.

Disability, like sickness, is not merely a physical condition, the state of an individual's body. It is also a collective status that relates the disabled person to Society. We analyze the evolution of this social status and we see how the perception of this phenomenon has changed over the ages. From this historical overview, the continuity as well as the discontinuity in changes can be observed, the changes that affect the institutions, values and conceptions having to do with disability.