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
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. O’Siadhail reads four sonnets from the book relating directly to clinical scenarios familiar to health care providers, caregivers, and family members, and to the trajectory Parkinson’s disease exhibits. We discuss the insights they offer that extend beyond those of conventional biomedical sources. O’Siadhail also tells us how the forms of poems contribute to their meaning, and offers thoughts on what drives fear of poetry among many, a fear that could needlessly result in missing the 150 opportunities in the book to better appreciate the array of issues confronting people with Parkinson’s disease than is otherwise possible.
Citation:
Micheal O’Siadhail. One Crimson Thread. Waco, Tx; Baylor University Press, 2015.
Links:
The sonnets read are reproduced and issues discussed during the podcast are summarized in Russell Teagarden’s companion blog piece in According to the Arts.
Micheal O’Siadhail’s website is here.
Baylor University Press details for One Crimson Thread are here.
Reminders:
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
