Abstract

The article presents Zygmunt Krasiński’s experiences and feelings connected with his illness in the context of the medical civilisation of his time. His stays in numerous health resorts and the water therapies which he receives there (hydrotherapy and balneotherapy) are regarded as mani-festations of a broader phenomenon, namely a transition from German Romantic medicine to the standards of somatic medicine which emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Discursive evidence of his illness, obtained from the poet’s epistolary sources and from his wife’s letters, was analysed in this aspect. On the one hand, due to parallel treatment of the body and the cosmos (an illness as a disharmony of the two orders), the ailing body and a troubled soul were understood to be a prerequisite for a spiritual metamorphosis of man and the world. On the order hand, there emerged an attempt to approach an illness from a somatic perspective, which was concurrent with the change of the medical standards of that time – an illness was no longer a domain of the romantic sublime, it became a physiological experience. In spite of the trend, however, Krasiński remained a supporter of perceiving his illness in a romantic way, with spiritual sphere regarded as superior to somatic sensations.

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