Saturday, 31 December 2011

Anamnesis

Word of the Day for Saturday, December 31, 2011

anamnesis \an-am-NEE-sis\, noun:
1. The recollection or remembrance of the past.
2. Platonism. Recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, especially by means of reasoning.
3. The medical history of a patient.
4. Immunology. A prompt immune response to a previously encountered antigen, characterised by more rapid onset and greater effectiveness of antibody and T cell reaction than during the first encounter, as after a booster shot in a previously immunised person.
5. (Often initial capital letter) a prayer in a Eucharistic service, recalling the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ.

When I was writing a novel about a fourteen-year-old girl, I must remember what I was like at fourteen, but this anamnesis is not a looking back, from my present chronological age, at Madeleine, aged fourteen.
-- Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

The narrator of Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man visits in his sleep, in a state of anamnesis perhaps, a humanity living in the Golden Age before the loss of innocence and happiness.
-- Czesław Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays

Anamnesis is derived from the Greek roots ana (meaning “re”) and mimnskein (meaning “to call to mind”). 

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