ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the literary and scientific nexus between the Spanish writer-physician and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal and the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. It explores the complex interplay between art and medicine in the work in which Cajal saw unparalleled beauty in the human brain, yielding a harmonious reciprocity between aesthetics and science. The chapter focuses on Cajal's science fiction story The Corrected Pessimist and Borges's celebrated ficcion Funes the Memorious, arguing that both tales yield provocative hypotheses based on the creation of characters simultaneously gifted and afflicted with super human powers of vision and memory respectively that eventually render their lives unbearable. Both fictions are representative of the productive intersections between literature and medicine: Cajal's science fiction speculations are informed by his scientific research and the historical context out of which they originated, while the Borgesian story of the tragic Funes is in dialogue with neurological case studies.
