Medicine and body disabilities in the poems and epigrams by Albert Ines

Abstract

Albert Ines (1619–1649) was one of the most important Polish-Latin poets of the 17th century. The subject of this text is the handling of the themes of medicine, health and disease in his work on the example of odes (“Lyricorum centuria”) and the collection of epigrams. The article analyses his disparaging jokes about physicians, popular in Roman and Greek tradition, and onomastic jokes about health and caricatural imagery of the body, i.e. obesity, lack of teeth, baldness or wigs. It also points at the figures of speech pertaining to the portrayal of the frailty of the human condition.