The Clinic & The Person

Send us Fan Mail We feature four different angles addressing the opioid crisis, mostly as the opioid product OxyContin is involved and as the Appalachian region is affected. Our objective is to show how realms outside Biomedicine—the Humanities, in this case—can provide a range of perspectives suited to preferences, interests, and needs for understanding a particular issue. The four angles we feat...

Send us Fan Mail We consider “illness as loss” through three different scenarios from Lionel Shriver’s novel, So Much For That . The three scenarios are: sociopsychological , financial , and clinical . We focus on how the literary novel form isolates these scenarios and offers fully reflective accounts of how people can be affected by them. We also note how literary fiction can be the only or best...

Send us Fan Mail 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 mem...

Send us Fan Mail We explore two paintings, each rendering one of two different perspectives on tuberculosis (TB). We first take a close look at Alice Neel’s 1940 painting, T.B. Harlem , and focus on how it depicts the suffering and destruction TB caused, and reveals some of the social determinants of TB at the time. We then examine Thomas Lawrence’s 1794 painting, Portrait of Catherine Rebecca Gre...

Send us Fan Mail We draw from two short stories published long ago, but recently discovered, that help us discern whether current problems associated with professionalism in health care and access to health care are unique to our time, or whether they have always been with us in one form or another. One of the stories is Anton Chekhov’s At the Pharmacy , written in 1885 and found in the late 1990s...

Send us Fan Mail We feature James Dickey’s poem, Diabetes , with our guest, the renowned physician-poet Dr. Jack Coulehan. We discuss insights the poem offers about the trajectory of type 2 diabetes from the time of symptom onset until the time a balance is achieved between maximum compliance with disease management requirements and the compromises an acceptable lifestyle can necessitate for many...

Send us Fan Mail What can it be like to have epileptic seizures? We draw from four sources—a memoir, two novels, and a movie. In particular, we the cover how these sources depict convulsive seizure events as people may experience them, the physical and mental harm they can produce, and the adaptations to daily activities and life plans they motivate. We compare these renderings with a description...

Send us Fan Mail 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, functionin...

Send us Fan Mail Introducing The Clinic & The Person, a podcast presenting works from the Humanities that bring knowledge and perspectives about particular clinical events and health care situations. The episode describes how the cohosts draw works from the Humanities and how health care professionals, educators, researchers, counsellors, and caregivers among others can apply them. The cohosts...