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
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 suggested “fictional analogs” could have application in conveying the existence of pain where there is doubt. We consider whether the speculative novel, The Illumination, could serve as a fictional analog. The novel centers on a sudden phenomenon in which a light shines from the part of anyone’s body where there is pain, and so erases any doubt. Though the author’s motivation for the phenomenon was not based on Scarry’s premise, we contemplate possible applications for it in Biomedicine and other realms where people in pain seek help.
We are joined by Dr. Ron Boeding from the iSpine Clinics located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota metropolitan area, serving patients from Minnesota and western Wisconsin. The clinics specialize in spine, neck, and extremity pain disorders and offer comprehensive pain management, interventional procedures, and physical medicine services. Dr. Boeding is board certified in family medicine and interventional pain management.
Sources:
Primary
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, Pantheon, 2011. It was named a Best Book of the Year in 2011 by National Public Radio, The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia City Paper.
Secondary
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, Oxford University Press, 1985
The Culture of Pain by John B. Morris, University of California Press, 1991
Link:
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on The Illumination
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.
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Executive producer: Anne Bentley
