The Clinic & The Person
The Clinic & The Person is a podcast bringing knowledge and perspectives from the humanities to certain aspects of biomedicine. “The Clinic” represents all that biomedicine brings to bear on diseases and treatments, and “The Person” represents all that people go through with health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities—any genre—directly related to how people are affected by specific clinical events such as migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, and dementia, and by specific health care situations such as restricted access to care and gut-wrenching, life and death choices. We analyze and interpret featured works and provide thoughts on their applications in patient care; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural trends and preoccupations. Often joining us are the creators of works we feature or experts on the topics we select.
The Clinic & The Person
Beautifier or Destroyer: Tuberculosis in Two Paintings
We explore two paintings, each rendering one of two different perspectives on tuberculosis (TB). We first take a close look at Alice Neel’s 1940 painting, T.B. Harlem, and focus on how it depicts the suffering and destruction TB caused, and reveals some of the social determinants of TB at the time. We then examine Thomas Lawrence’s 1794 painting, Portrait of Catherine Rebecca Grey, Lady Manners, and work through how it conveys the convergence of TB clinical manifestations with beauty ideals at the time.
Links:
Here are the links for the paintings we discuss:
T.B. Harlem, Alice Neel, 1940, oil on canvas
Portrait of Catherine Rebecca Grey, Lady Manners, Thomas Lawrence (1794), oil on canvas
The Sick Child, Edvard Munch, 1907, oil on canvas
Background sources:
JAMA issue featuring cover with Alice Neel painting, T.B. Harlem, and William Barclay commentary.
Russell Teagarden’s According to the Arts blog piece on T.B. Harlem.
Hoban P. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Day, C. Consumptive Chic. London, Bloomsbury Visual Art; 2017, 189 pages.
Russell Teagarden’s According to the Arts blog piece on Carolyn Day’s book, Consumptive Chic.
Day C, Rauser A. Thomas Lawrence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’s Hectic Flush in 1794, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 4 (2016) pp. 455–74. (Not open access)
Russell Teagarden’s According to the Arts blog pieces on The Sick Child, and on Munch’s approach to his painting, and podcast episode with Øystein Ustvedt, curator and Munch expert on Munch's paintings rendering illness, suffering, and grief.
Here's an image representative of the 1990s fashion trend known as “Heroin Chic” that we referred to during the podcast.
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
