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.
Episodes
29 episodes
I’m Sick, Therefore I Am: Illness as Normality in Nervous System with Author Lina Meruane
Susan Sontag has said, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Author Lina Meruane challenges the idea that people w...
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Episode 28
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59:08
Lights, Camera, Deny: Managed Care at the Movies
Four movies released between 1997 and 2002 picked up on the anger and resentment building among people encountering increasingly aggressive managed health care tactics aimed at reducing costs during that time. The four movies are: As Good A...
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Episode 27
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40:42
Consumptive Heroines: Opera and TB with Drs Linda and Michael Hutcheon
The trajectories of tuberculosis (TB) and opera met in the mid-nineteenth century most notably with the production of La Traviata in 1853, and then La Bohème near the century’s end. With eminent scholars Linda and Michael Hutc...
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Episode 26
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1:13:22
Painting an Ideal: Luke Fildes’ The Doctor with Hannah Darvin
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 paintin...
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Episode 25
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53:10
“We Give Up Living, Just to Keep Alive”: Three Essayists on Health Care Decisions
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 dau...
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Episode 24
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52:59
Heal Me: Childhood Trauma in The Who’s Tommy with Dr. Anthony Tobia
When the British band, The Who, released their double album, Tommy, in 1969, many of the songs in it became instant classics and served as anthems for the Baby Boomer generation ever since. The album was characterized as a “rock opera,...
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Episode 23
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47:05
Illness as Exile in the Greek Tragedy Philoctetes with Paul Ranelli
Greek tragedies often concern identifiable and universal problems humans have confronted over the millennia. Among these problems are those illness and suffering create. In this episode we draw from Sophocles’ play, Philoctetes, and in...
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Episode 22
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49:59
“No Escape from Reality:” Thomas Kuhn and the Reliability of Medical Knowledge
“Should we worry about the reliability of medical knowledge?” asks philosopher John Huss (University of Akron). We consider this question from the perspective of Thomas...
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Episode 21
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45:02
“I’m Filled with Desire”: Eros & Illness with David B. Morris
People can have certain desires stemming from their illnesses, for the arts, health, companionship, serenity, and meaning among other possibilities. The scholar, writer, and teacher David B. Morris considers these desires a form of eros that sh...
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Episode 20
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51:16
Andrew Leland’s Country of the Blind: It’s the Same World
Andrew Leland is a major figure as a writer, editor, producer, teacher, and podcaster across the mainstream American cultural landscape. He has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Believer,...
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Episode 19
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53:25
What Desire Will Shape a World We’re Left?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail on Covid
Four years after the Covid pandemic began, as daily life has returned in large measure to its pre-pandemic shape, assessments and reflections about how the pandemic was able to wreak such havoc and how it could be prevented from occurring again...
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Episode 18
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54:29
AIDS in the Comics: The Graphic Memoir Taking Turns with MK Czerwiec
We return to the subject of how terrible the HIV/AIDS crisis was at its peak. The first time (Episode 9...
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Episode 17
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51:52
Life Imitates Art: Covid-19 Edition
Human behaviors in many segments of society during the Covid-19 pandemic could have been predicted based on literary texts from the past and right up to the moment the pandemic began. In this episode, we compare excerpts from selected literary ...
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Episode 16
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47:21
Painting with Empathy: The Expressionist Art of Edvard Munch with Curator Øystein Ustvedt
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 expres...
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Episode 15
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52:52
Reconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia Stories
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, center...
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Episode 14
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41:29
He Wants to Itch at It: A Novel, Play, and Movie Imagining Dementia
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 p...
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Episode 13
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54:37
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 t...
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Episode 12
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53:01
The Dose Makes the Poison: Two Novels, Two Poisons, Two Emergency Medicine Physicians
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 thro...
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Episode 11
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52:56
If Pain Were Coupled with Light: The Novel The Illumination with Dr. Ron Boeding
“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 su...
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Episode 10
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51:52
How Terrible it Was: Three Takes on the AIDS Crisis with Dr. Ross Slotten
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, ...
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Episode 9
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55:46
Getting Dopesick: Four Angles on the Opioid Crisis
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—ca...
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Episode 8
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46:58
A Lifespan the Length of a Dog’s: Illness as Loss in the Novel So Much For That
We consider “illness as loss” through three different scenarios from Lionel Shriver’s novel, So Much For That. The three scenarios are: sociopsychological, financial, and clinical. We focus on how the literar...
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Episode 7
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47:20
I Hold You Still?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail Explains Parkinson’s Disease in Sonnets
The internationally-acclaimed poet, Micheal O’Siadhail (pronounced, Meehawl O’Sheel), joins us to talk about One Crimson Thread, a memoir of 150 sonnets he wrote about the last two years of his late wife’s life with Parkinson’s disease...
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Episode 6
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59:23
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...
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Episode 5
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49:38
Six Kopeks or Your Life: Two Short Stories about Health Care Professionalism and Access
We draw from two short stories published long ago, but recently discovered, that help us discern whether current problems associated with professionalism in health care and access to health care are unique to our time, or whether they have alwa...
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Episode 4
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47:57