Paradison anatomy-chart advertisement

The Paradison anatomy-chart advertisement is a commercial image that Kemal Basmacı turns into a diagram of lovesickness. Once displayed in pharmacies across Istanbul, it becomes, in his account, a way to show museum visitors where his anguish began, how it spread through his body, and how hope of seeing Füsun prolonged it.

Provenance and Use

The chart depicts the internal organs and originally appeared in an advertisement for Paradison, a painkiller visible in pharmacy windows throughout Istanbul. Kemal adapts the image for the museum, using an overlay to indicate the changing locations and extent of his pain. He also addresses readers who cannot visit the museum, making the chart both a displayed object and an instrument for narrating an experience beyond the museum’s walls.

The Diagram of Lovesickness

The overlay traces the pain from the upper-left area of the stomach toward the space between the lungs and stomach, then across the abdomen. At its most expansive, the diagram shows pain reaching the throat and mouth, while another pattern radiates outward from the navel. Kemal says physical exertion could briefly interrupt the sensation, but not remove it: even when subdued, the pain remained. The chart thus records not a single fixed point but an expanding and recurring bodily experience.

The image also distinguishes love’s pain from the shorter, more contained pain of regret. Kemal locates regret in the backs of his legs and lungs, associating it with his failure to recover Füsun’s earring, return her childhood tricycle, teach her mathematics properly, and attend the promised supper with her family. The chart’s anatomical divisions give separate shapes to these related forms of suffering without making either one merely abstract.

Meaning in Kemal’s Account

For all the bodily locations mapped on the chart, Kemal identifies the source of the pain as his mind and soul. The advertisement therefore serves less as a medical explanation than as a visual framework through which he can make private anguish legible to museum visitors. Its familiar commercial origin contrasts with the intensely personal meaning he assigns it.

The chart also makes visible a cycle that sustains the suffering: each new day brings fresh hope that Füsun will appear at the Merhamet Apartments, and that hope makes the pain bearable while prolonging it. The diagram gives this contradiction a spatial form. It shows the reach of the anguish, while Kemal’s account explains why it persists.