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
When Neurons Get Tied Up in Knots: Human Fallibility and Folly in Asylum Psychiatry
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
