Surgery, bacteriology, psychiatry … medicine fascinated writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. But why did medicine capture the creative imagination at precisely that moment, and what does the prevalence of medical imagery in works of the period tell us about interwar culture? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies for interrogating the wider phenomenon.

Contributing to an emerging body of scholarship bringing the Medical Humanities and Slavonic Studies into dialogue, the book focuses on four particularly prevalent medical themes in the literature and cinema of the period: syphilis, nervous illness, surgery and childbirth. It offers new perspectives on works by well-known figures of interwar Russian and Czech culture (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Gustav Machatý and Vladislav Vancura) as well as familiarizing readers with more obscure works by some of their lesser-known counterparts, such as Vladimír Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin.