The Clinic & The Person – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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The renowned English social realist and portrait painter, Luke Fildes (rhymes with “childs”), created The Doctor in 1891 after Henry Tate commissioned a painting from him for his new museum, the Tate Britain. The subject of the painting was Fildes’ choice. Despite a poor reception among art critics when it was first exhibited, the painting quickly became iconic as the physician ideal. Over its 133-year history, the painting has been used for a variety of purposes, including inspiration, education, propaganda, and politics. During that time, the ways in which the painting represents the physician ideal changed. We talk about these aspects of the painting with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She has conducted extensive research into the painting and its creator.

Links

• Image of The Doctor from the Tate Britain Museum.
• About Hannah Darvin at Queen’s University.
• Hannah Darvin’s description of her research for the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
• John Brewer Eberly’s diptych rendering a modern version of The Doctor in which computer technology is interjected between doctor and patient. 

The next episode will feature opera and how as an art form it can render illnesses in ways that elaborate on bioscience texts and teachings. For examples, we will draw from two operas featuring female characters with tuberculosis (“consumptive heroines”), namely, La Traviata and La Bohème. Joining us will be Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, who have combined their expertise in comparative literature and medicine, respectively, with their love for opera into an expansive body of scholarly work making both opera and medicine more interesting and better appreciated.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

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The scope and intensity of health care products and services available today make it necessary for us to have thoughts about how much of our way of life we would be willing to give up for them. Finding the balance that works for people is a daunting task. They feel the gravitational pull of health care providers and related industries, and they face the pressures family, friends, and cultural attitudes and expectations can put on them to use all the health care services available. We consider this subject as three essayists thought about it. The essayists are Barbara Ehrenreich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Michel de Montaigne. We identify some of these forces and discuss how the essayists reacted to them in their writings.

Primary Sources:

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer; Twelve, 2018. 

Emanuel, Ezekiel J. "Why I Hope to Die at 75." The Atlantic, Oct. 2014.

de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame, introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Everyman's Library; Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Links:

• Website for the Hartford HealthCare Elevate Health “series of 1-minute informational segments about health topics” heard on Connecticut Public Radio. 
• The recently-published novel from which the last audio clip was taken is Blood Test, written by Charles Baxter and published in 2024 by Pantheon Books. Russell Teagarden's blog piece on novel.
•  Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
• Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Montaigne’s essays covering his thoughts on doctors and health care services.  
• Ezekiel Emanuel’s website.
• Ezekiel Emanuel’s 2014 article in The Atlantic (behind paywall).
• Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on news show where he updates his position on how he manages his health care. 
• PDF of Montaigne’s collected essays (Project Gutenberg)

The next episode will feature Luke Fildes’ painting, The Doctor (1891) with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Toronto, Canada. Here is the link to the painting from the Tate Britain Museum in London, England. We will focus on how the painting has been viewed as a work of art and how it has served as an ideal of medicine when it was created and since.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

 Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your

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While in Oslo, Norway visiting family, Russell Teagarden went to the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) to speak with Øystein Ustvedt, who is a curator and noted expert on the art of Edvard Munch. The interview concentrates on Munch’s work expressing emotional dimensions of anxiety, illness, grief, and suffering. Ustvedt talks about how Munch’s life story explains the sources for his empathy and artistic inclinations, identifies and discusses the paintings particularly effective in expressing emotions illness and suffering generate, and considers how Munch’s work could benefit health professions students and practitioners. Russell’s 5½-year-old granddaughter teaches him how to say, “National Museum” and “goodbye,” in Norwegian, with varying success.


Links:

Links to paintings discussed:

• Puberty (1894)
•  The Sick Child (1885)
•  Spring (1891) 
• Sick Girl (Christian Krogh, 1881)
• Death in the Sickroom (1893)
•  The Spanish Flu (1919)
• Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943)
• Melancholy (1892)
•  The Scream (1893)

Link to Russell Teagarden’s blog piece in According to the Arts on Øystein Ustvedt’s book, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life.

Link to National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo


Thanks to Benedict Teagarden for the idea of speaking with an expert on Edvard Munch while in Oslo, and to Ingvild for the Norwegian language lessons. 

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer: Anne Bentley

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The millions of families dealing with Alzheimer’s disease produce millions of their own stories. We focus on two particular elements that can be part of a family’s story about dementia. One, from a collection of autobiographical stories, centers on an adult daughter with a long-standing, and justifiable antipathy towards her mother, who nevertheless finds a way to aid her when dementia takes hold. And, while doing so, she finds a new relationship with her mother and takes delight in the personality dementia produces for a time. The other, drawn from a novel, centers on various forms of denial a wife exhibits over several years of her husband’s dementia progression.

Featured Content Sources:

Stories from, The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2014

Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014


Links:

From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts: 

• The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical text
• We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas

Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer:  Anne Bentley

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What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.

Featured Content Sources:

• The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
• The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
• The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services. 

Links:

Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts: 

• The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
• The Father: the play and the movie

Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.

Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.

Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia: 

• Patrick Fox.  From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
• Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

 
Executive producer:  Anne Bentley

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We look to three sources, a movie (The Mountain), a documentary film (The Lobotomist), and a nonfiction book (Desperate Remedies), for perspectives on human fallibility and folly in American asylum psychiatry during the first half of the 20th century. We focus in particular on the consequences of the overconfidence asylum psychiatry exhibited, the problem of medical knowledge in play, and the vulnerability of affected people from an absence of agency. These sources pointed to lobotomies, dental extractions, abdominal eviscerations, insulin comas, and other like illustrative interventions as case studies of what were once hailed as best medical practices that became horrors later. Recognizing that human fallibility and folly are an unchangeable feature of the human condition, we muse about whether we are any less exposed to such horrors today and forever.

Content Sources:

The Mountain – writer / director Rick Alverson, Vice Studios, 2018. 

The Lobotomist – writer Barak Goodman, producers and directors Barak Goodman and John Maggio / American Experience (PBS) /available online at Vimeo, 2008. 

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness ­­– author Andrew Scull / Belknap, 2022.

 Audio clips from the documentary film, The Lobotomist, credits here.

Links:

Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces at According to the Arts on The Mountain and Desperate Remedies.

Other related blog pieces at According to the Arts:

Civilization and Madness:  A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault

Birth of the Clinic:  An Archeology of Medical Perception, Michel Foucault

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell

The Lobotomist is available online at Vimeo.

 Francisco Goya’s painting referenced in the episode, The Madhouse.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer:  Anne Bentley

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We look at two literary descriptions of self-poisoning through the novels, Belladonna and Madame Bovary, and compare them with classic biomedical texts. We focus on how vividly the literary texts depict what people can go through after having poisoned themselves with belladonna or arsenic, how well these descriptions represent or elaborate on biomedical texts and teaching, and the applications they offer to health care practitioners, students, and the general public.  

We are joined by Dr. Kamna Balhara and Dr. Andrew Stolbach, both of whom are associate professors and emergency medicine physicians at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Dr. Balhara also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in French studies, is a founder and co-director of Health Humanities at Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine (H3EM), and is a member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. Dr. Stolbach is also a medical toxicologist and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Health. Better guests for this episode could not be found. Their expertise on and enthusiasm for the topic and content sources make for an engaging episode.

Links to content sources:

Literary:

Belladonna, by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New York, New Directions, 2017.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, Translated by Geoffrey Wall. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 2003.

Biomedical:

Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies, 11e. McGraw Hill; 2019.
Goodman & Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 13e, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2018.
Case study: Unseasonal severe poisoning of two adults by deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna). Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health. 2000;120(2):127-130.
The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. New York, NY: Penguin Books; 2010.

Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces on Belladonna and Madame Bovary at According to the Arts.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer: Anne Bentley

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“To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt,” Professor Elaine Scarry has said, and furthermore stipulates that, “Physical pain not only resists language, but actively destroys it.” She has suggested “fictional analogs” could have application in conveying the existence of pain where there is doubt. We consider whether the speculative novel, The Illumination, could serve as a fictional analog. The novel centers on a sudden phenomenon in which a light shines from the part of anyone’s body where there is pain, and so erases any doubt. Though the author’s motivation for the phenomenon was not based on Scarry’s premise, we contemplate possible applications for it in Biomedicine and other realms where people in pain seek help.

We are joined by Dr. Ron Boeding from the iSpine Clinics located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota metropolitan area, serving patients from Minnesota and western Wisconsin. The clinics specialize in spine, neck, and extremity pain disorders and offer comprehensive pain management, interventional procedures, and physical medicine services. Dr. Boeding is board certified in family medicine and interventional pain management.


Sources:

Primary
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, Pantheon, 2011. It was named a Best Book of the Year in 2011 by National Public Radio, The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia City Paper.

Secondary
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, Oxford University Press, 1985
The Culture of Pain by John B. Morris, University of California Press, 1991


Link:

Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on The Illumination


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer:  Anne Bentley

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On this episode, we talk with Dr. Ross Slotten about his memoir, Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis. He covers the time from when he entered family medicine practice just as AIDS was emerging, through the crisis, and the decades since as both a physician and a member of the at-risk community of gay men on the north side of Chicago. We also talk with Dr. Slotten about two other sources covering the early years of the AIDS crisis: a documentary film about the first country’s first AIDS unit at San Francisco General Hospital, and a literary novel about a group of gay men with AIDS or at risk for AIDS in Chicago. 

More about Dr. Slotten’s background is here, which includes authorship of the book, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (published by Columbia University Press, 2006).

Sources:

Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis by Ross Slotten, published 2020, University of Chicago Press

5B, directed by Paul Haggis and Dan Krauss, released June 2019

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, published 2019

Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces on episode sources:

Plague Years
5B
The Great Believers

Recommendations (we didn’t have time to talk about):

Rent (play, movie), Jonathan Larson

Angels in America (play, movie), Tony Kushner

Blue (movie), Derek Jarman

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

 
Executive producer:  Anne Bentley

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We feature four different angles addressing the opioid crisis, mostly as the opioid product OxyContin is involved and as the Appalachian region is affected. Our objective is to show how realms outside Biomedicine—the Humanities, in this case—can provide a range of perspectives suited to preferences, interests, and needs for understanding a particular issue. The four angles we feature are: nonfiction investigative journalism; nonfiction dramatization; narrative nonfiction; and literary fiction. We consider different approaches to selecting the best choice or the best order among available options.

Source Citations:

Macy B. Dopesick. New York; Little, Brown, and Company, 2018
Strong D. Dopesick. John Goldwyn Productions, 2021 (streamed on Hulu)
Keefe PR. Empire of Pain. New York; Doubleday, 2021.
Kingsolver B. Demon Copperhead; Harper, 2022. (Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Links:

Russell Teagardens According to the Arts blog pieces mentioned in the podcast: 

• Dopesick (nonfiction book – investigative)
•  Dopesick (TV miniseries)
• Empire of Pain (narrative nonfiction)
• Demon Copperhead (novel)

 Russell Teagarden’s article in The Pharos comparing Dopesick (the book and the TV miniseries) with Demon Copperhead

Recommendations:

Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Beth Macy (Nov 2, 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSglbhS1-WU&t=15s 

De Quincey T. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. New York; Penguin Classics, 2003. (See Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on this book here.) 

Daudet A. In the Land of Pain. (Translator Julian Barnes) New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. (See Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on this book here.)


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

 Executive producer:  Anne Bentley