<i>Nada</i> : A Medical Humanities Perspective

In this article, I aver that Nada can offer us a privileged insight into a wide range of mental health conditions in the postwar period which afflicted both female and male characters. This biomedical motif problematizes prescribed gender roles of post-war Spain, as Carmen Laforet brings male and female mental illnesses into dialogue with gender and contemporaneous medical discourses. Nada is thus reinterpreted as a sensitive interpretation of both female and male mental health from the 1920s to the postwar period. which defies the social silence surrounding mental illnesses to induce readerly compassion for the afflicted characters.