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
Holes and Lobotomies: Seeing and Feeling Migraine
We examine excerpts from Siri Hustvedt’s novel, The Blindfold, and from Joan Didion’s essay, In Bed, for the perspectives they offer on what people experience when migraines strike them. We discuss how Hustvedt’s and Didion’s renderings of migraines add to classic biomedical descriptions, and consider the implications of migraine prevalence on the degree of suffering, functioning, and health care consumption. We muse about how these literary texts and others like them can be applied in helping people who suffer migraines and in helping people who care for them.
Additional background on the excerpts we cover, and excerpts from other books describing the effects of migraine are in Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts. An expanded analysis of the physical effects of migraine as depicted in The Blindfold can also be found on the blog here.
Some migraine prevalence data available from open-source publications are here and here.
Bibliographic information:
The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt, Picador, New York, 1992
In Bed: In The White Album, Joan Didion, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1979
Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Joan Didion's essay to our attention.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Subscribe to The Clinic & The Person at wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us comments and questions at: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.
