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 are coming forth. Many are technocratic in nature and assume our aims and pursuits will remain the same as before. Micheal O’Siadhail (pronounced mee-hawl o’sheel), in his new book of poems, Desire, says that in addition to technocratic responses to the pandemic (and other threats to civilization covered in the book), we should give serious thought to what we desire. We talk to O’Siadhail about this idea and he reads selected poems from the book that characterize many aspects of what the pandemic put people through collectively and individually. He also talks about how the forms of his poetry convey his thoughts just as his words do, and how poetry, through syntax, sound, meter, and intensity, can add clarity and effectiveness to prosaic prose communicating complex concepts.

Citation:

Micheal O’Siadhail. Desire. Waco, Tx; Baylor University Press, 2023.


Links:

Micheal O’Siadhail’s website.

Russell Teagarden’s relevant blog pieces in According to the Arts:

• Desire
• One Crimson Thread

Previous podcast episode with Micheal O’Siadhail featuring his poems recounting his late wife’s final years with Parkinson’s disease.

Thanks to Micheal O’Siadhail for bringing his enlightened perspectives on what we experienced with Covid through the piercing poetry in his book, Desire.


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

We return to the subject of how terrible the HIV/AIDS crisis was at its peak. The first time (Episode 9) we drew from a memoir, documentary film, and a literary novel. This time we feature the graphic memoir, Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 with the author MK Czerwiec. She created a memoir of her time as a nurse in an HIV/AIDS using the comic medium. Since then, Czerwiec has become a leading figure in Graphic Medicine. We talk to her about the Graphic Medicine field and its many applications, and about the many illustrative and poignant insights her book offers about the AIDS crisis in ways biomedical texts and few of the other arts can do nearly as well.

Links:

Website for Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 372

MK Czerwiec’s website

Graphic Medicine organization website

Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 372 in According to the Arts


Thanks to MK Czerwiec for opening our world to graphic medicine and expanding our understanding of the AIDS crisis through your graphic memoir.

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

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 texts imagining or depicting human reactions to plagues ranging from as far back as 700 years to just one month after the pandemic began with statements made or actions taken during the pandemic. The similarities are uncanny. Russell is inclined to think this means we’re doomed; Dan is not so inclined.

Links:

Links to Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces in According to the Arts on the sources discussed in episode:

• The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, New York, Penguin Classics, 1972 (written in 1351-1353) 
• The Pandemic’s Impact on NYC Migration Patterns, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, Bureau of Budget, November 2021.
• Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis, In: Sinclair Lewis: Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, Library Classics of the United States, New York, 2002 (first published in 1925)
• The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni, Penguin Books, New York, 1972 (first published in 1827)
• The End of October, Lawrence Wright, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020

Links to sound clips:

• Romeo & Juliet, Act 5, Scene 2 – Shakespeare at Play
• Contagion (2011) – Steven Soderbergh, director; Scot Z. Burns, writer

 
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

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 expressing emotional dimensions of anxiety, illness, grief, and suffering. Ustvedt talks about how Munch’s life story explains the sources for his empathy and artistic inclinations, identifies and discusses the paintings particularly effective in expressing emotions illness and suffering generate, and considers how Munch’s work could benefit health professions students and practitioners. Russell’s 5½-year-old granddaughter teaches him how to say, “National Museum” and “goodbye,” in Norwegian, with varying success.


Links:

Links to paintings discussed:

• Puberty (1894)
•  The Sick Child (1885)
•  Spring (1891) 
• Sick Girl (Christian Krogh, 1881)
• Death in the Sickroom (1893)
•  The Spanish Flu (1919)
• Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943)
• Melancholy (1892)
•  The Scream (1893

Link to Russell Teagarden’s blog piece in According to the Arts on Øystein Ustvedt’s book, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life.

Link to National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo


Thanks to Benedict Teagarden for the idea of speaking with an expert on Edvard Munch while in Oslo, and to Ingvild for the Norwegian language lessons. 

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

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, centers on an adult daughter with a long-standing, and justifiable antipathy towards her mother, who nevertheless finds a way to aid her when dementia takes hold. And, while doing so, she finds a new relationship with her mother and takes delight in the personality dementia produces for a time. The other, drawn from a novel, centers on various forms of denial a wife exhibits over several years of her husband’s dementia progression. 

Featured Content Sources:

Stories from, The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2014

Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014


Links:

From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts: 

• The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical text
• We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas

Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.


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

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 play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.

Featured Content Sources:

• The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
• The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
• The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services. 

Links:

Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts: 

• The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
• The Father: the play and the movie

Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.

Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.

Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia: 

• Patrick Fox.  From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
• Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.

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

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

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 through after having poisoned themselves with belladonna or arsenic, how well these descriptions represent or elaborate on biomedical texts and teaching, and the applications they offer to health care practitioners, students, and the general public.  

We are joined by Dr. Kamna Balhara and Dr. Andrew Stolbach, both of whom are associate professors and emergency medicine physicians at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Dr. Balhara also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in French studies, is a founder and co-director of Health Humanities at Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine (H3EM), and is a member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. Dr. Stolbach is also a medical toxicologist and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Health. Better guests for this episode could not be found. Their expertise on and enthusiasm for the topic and content sources make for an engaging episode.

Links to content sources:

Literary:

Belladonna, by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New York, New Directions, 2017.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, Translated by Geoffrey Wall. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 2003.

Biomedical:

Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies, 11e. McGraw Hill; 2019.
Goodman & Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 13e, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2018.
Case study: Unseasonal severe poisoning of two adults by deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna). Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health. 2000;120(2):127-130.
The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. New York, NY: Penguin Books; 2010.

Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces on Belladonna and Madame Bovary at According to the Arts.


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