Дискурс медичного піклування у творах Модеста Левицького

Modest Levytskyi was a well-known Ukrainian public figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a writer and a doctor by profession who repeatedly addressed the topic of medical care in his prose works. His prose works have already been studied in terms of themes, issues, and stylistics, but there has been no special research on the reproduction of medical discourse in his texts. The study aims to analyse the discourse of medical care in his literary texts of small genres (short stories, novels, essays). In his prose texts of small genres, Modest Levytskyi brings out the images of district and railway doctors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the times when he was engaged in medical practice in these positions. Through the prism of their images, he shows the state of Ukrainian medicine of that time for people of the lower strata of society; the coexistence of folk, unconventional, and official, professional medicine; the state of health of ordinary people of that time, their typical diseases and methods and forms of their treatment. Through his literary texts, Modest Levytskyi not only showed the real state of medical affairs of the time, but also raised public awareness of disease prevention and the need to seek timely treatment from professional doctors.