The Clinic & The Person

Send us Fan Mail The diagnosis and clinical management of various mental disorders are aided by knowing the predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating factors in a given case. Both the themed album and the full-length movie of Pink Floyd’s, The Wall , depict these factors in the course of the main character’s—"Pink’s”— mental health deterioration through music and film. In this episode, we...

Send us Fan Mail The Clinic & Person podcast returns, and this short episode recounts the reasons for its return and what can be expected. The general objectives of the podcast remain the same in that we will still draw from certain works such as literature, art, film, music, etc., but source content will also come from certain ideas or disciplines such as philosophy, ethics, sociology, econom...

Send us Fan Mail We end the podcast after thirty episodes over three years. In this brief, last episode, we announce the end of this series, explain our reasons for ending it now, summarize what we covered over the thirty episodes, and express our appreciation for our listeners and the guests who came on the podcast. We also reveal what is next for us, which will involve similar interests but we w...

Send us Fan Mail Note : The story and the images in the book we cover in this episode could bring back memories of unhappy and traumatic events for some people who have experienced cancer in some way.  This episode centers on the fictional story of a forty-three-year-old woman’s course with recurrent, metastatic breast cancer. She has a coming-of-age-daughter and a treasured husband. The story is...

Send us Fan Mail Michael Pollan, a journalist long known for his work in food and nutrition, and as the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma , shifted his attention to psychedelics when they were beginning to win favor again after having been shunned—legally and culturally—for three decades. Pollan’s interest took the form of “immersive journalism,” meaning he tried some of the psychedelics himself, a...

Send us Fan Mail 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 with illnesses are necessarily separated into a different kingdom than those who are not sick, asserting instead that illness can be part of...

Send us Fan Mail 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 As It Gets ; The Rainmaker ; Critical Care ; and John Q . We talk about how they caught and depicted the rage as it was just reaching the surfac...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Hutcheon, we talk about how these trajectories converged and how these resulting two operas then brought attention to the medical effects of the infection and th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 painting was Fildes’ choice. Despite a poor reception among art critics when it was first exhibited, the painting quickly became iconic as the physician id...

Send us Fan Mail 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 daunting task. They feel the gravitational pull of health care providers and related industries, and they face the pressures family, friends,...

Send us Fan Mail 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,” because when connected, the songs told the story of the “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy. The storyline made possible subsequent musicals, firs...

Send us Fan Mail 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 particular, how it depicts illness as exile . With our guest, Professor Paul Ranelli , we first cover the characteristics of Greek tragedies that...

Send us Fan Mail “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 Kuhn’s classic, 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Kuhn explains how science does not evolve incrementally, one step following another, but rather undergoes wholesale revolutions disconnected from...

Send us Fan Mail 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 should be taken into account as a part of what people go through with their illnesses and what could potentially help them. We speak with Dav...

Send us Fan Mail 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 , McSweeney’s , Radiolab , The Organist , and 99% Invisible among other respected sources, and has taught at prestigious universities. Amidst it all, he has been pr...

Send us Fan Mail 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 (pro...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 wi...

Send us Fan Mail 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 hi...

Send us Fan Mail 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 dem...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ab...

Send us Fan Mail 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 knowledg...

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail “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 specula...

Send us Fan Mail 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, and the decades since as both a physician and a member of the at-risk community of gay men on the north side of Chicago. We also talk with Dr. Slot...