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The Clinic & The PersonWhen God Closes a Podcast...Send us a textWe 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 will expand our sources beyond humanities in a narrow sense to encompass broader ideas relevant to health and biomedicine, such as philosophy, ethics, sociology, history, and...
2025-11-2513 minThe Clinic & The PersonCancer as a Narrator in Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies with Dr. Laurel LyckholmSend us a textNote: 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 a common one in literature and in real life, but the way it’s told in Maddie Mortimer’s novel, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, is not...
2025-07-0959 minThe Clinic & The PersonPsychedelics for Everyone? Michael Pollan’s Immersive Journalistic InvestigationSend us a textMichael 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, and directed his investigation into “the potential for these molecules as a tool for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.” The result was his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, and a comp...
2025-05-2251 minThe Clinic & The PersonI’m Sick, Therefore I Am: Illness as Normality in Nervous System with Author Lina MeruaneSend us a textSusan 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 anyone’s normality. She makes this case through her novel, Nervous System. The novel tells the stories of four family members and a boyfriend who, at one time or ano...
2025-04-1159 minThe Clinic & The PersonLights, Camera, Deny: Managed Care at the MoviesSend us a textFour 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 surface of broad societal notice and concern. We note how the rage persists despite efforts on many levels to address it over the years, and wonder if it has reached its apogee...
2025-03-1040 minThe Clinic & The PersonConsumptive Heroines: Opera and TB with Drs Linda and Michael HutcheonSend us a textThe 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 the sociocultural influences on its spread. We also discuss how the discovery of germ therapy during the time between the staging of these operas affected the way social behaviors changed accordingly, tha...
2025-02-051h 13The Clinic & The PersonPainting an Ideal: Luke Fildes’ The Doctor with Hannah DarvinSend us a textThe 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 ideal. Over its 133-year history, the painting has been used for a variety of purposes, including inspiration, education, propaganda, and politics. During that time, the ways in which the painting represents the physician ideal...
2024-12-2953 minThe Clinic & The Person“We Give Up Living, Just to Keep Alive”: Three Essayists on Health Care DecisionsSend us a textThe 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, and cultural attitudes and expectations can put on them to use all the health care services available. We consider this subject as three essayists thought about...
2024-11-1452 minThe Clinic & The PersonHeal Me: Childhood Trauma in The Who’s Tommy with Dr. Anthony TobiaSend us a textWhen 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, first as a movie in 1975, and then as a Broadway play in 1993 and as a revival in 2024. Underlying the storyline in each of these genres are the psychiatric consequences of childhood trauma T...
2024-10-0147 minThe Clinic & The PersonIllness as Exile in the Greek Tragedy Philoctetes with Paul RanelliSend us a textGreek 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 are applicable to illness and suffering (i.e., enduring relevance, catharsis, empathy). We then cover the play, Philoctetes, what it tells about illness as exile, and how it connects to more recent writings on the concept (e.g...
2024-08-2949 minThe Clinic & The Person“No Escape from Reality:” Thomas Kuhn and the Reliability of Medical KnowledgeSend us a text“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 all that came before. He called these revolutions, “paradigm shifts” (to his everlasting regret). While Kuhn draws mostly from astronomy to make his case, we draw from recent and past medical examples to show how his concept applies to medicine as well. W...
2024-07-3045 minThe Clinic & The Person“I’m Filled with Desire”: Eros & Illness with David B. MorrisSend us a textPeople 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 David Morris about the relationship between eros and illness, and evaluate it using examples from art, literature, and theater. We muse about possible applications.Primary Source Citation
2024-06-2251 minThe Clinic & The PersonAndrew Leland’s Country of the Blind: It’s the Same WorldSend us a textAndrew 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 progressing towards blindness as a result of retinitis pigmentosa. As his sight diminished to the extent he needed assistance, Leland became motivated to investigate what the world would be for him when his sight was all bu...
2024-05-1053 minThe Clinic & The PersonWhat Desire Will Shape a World We’re Left?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail on CovidSend us a textFour 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...
2024-04-0354 minThe Clinic & The PersonAIDS in the Comics: The Graphic Memoir Taking Turns with MK CzerwiecSend us a textWe 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...
2024-02-2751 minThe Clinic & The PersonLife Imitates Art: Covid-19 EditionSend us a textHuman 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....
2024-01-2947 minThe Clinic & The PersonPainting with Empathy: The Expressionist Art of Edvard Munch with Curator Øystein UstvedtSend us a textWhile 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...
2023-12-2752 minThe Clinic & The PersonReconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia StoriesSend us a textThe 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 nove...
2023-11-3041 minThe Clinic & The PersonHe Wants to Itch at It: A Novel, Play, and Movie Imagining DementiaSend us a textWhat 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 me...
2023-10-2754 minThe Clinic & The PersonWhen Neurons Get Tied Up in Knots: Human Fallibility and Folly in Asylum PsychiatrySend us a textWe 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...
2023-09-2753 minThe Clinic & The PersonThe Dose Makes the Poison: Two Novels, Two Poisons, Two Emergency Medicine PhysiciansSend us a textWe 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 a...
2023-08-2452 minThe Clinic & The PersonIf Pain Were Coupled with Light: The Novel The Illumination with Dr. Ron BoedingSend us a text“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...
2023-07-2851 minThe Clinic & The PersonHow Terrible it Was: Three Takes on the AIDS Crisis with Dr. Ross SlottenSend us a textOn 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. Slotten about two other sources covering the early years of the AIDS crisis: a documentary film about the first country’s first AIDS unit...
2023-06-2355 minThe Clinic & The PersonGetting Dopesick: Four Angles on the Opioid CrisisSend us a textWe 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 feature are: nonfiction investigative journalism; nonfiction dramatization; narrative nonfiction; and literary fiction. We consider different approaches to selecting the best choice or the best order among available options. Source Citations:...
2023-04-2346 minThe Clinic & The PersonA Lifespan the Length of a Dog’s: Illness as Loss in the Novel So Much For ThatSend us a textWe 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 medium for subjects often too sensitive for public forums such as whether money can be an object in health care decisions. We spend some time distinguishing illness as what people experience subjec...
2023-03-2147 minThe Clinic & The PersonI Hold You Still?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail Explains Parkinson’s Disease in SonnetsSend us a textThe 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...
2023-02-1859 minThe Clinic & The PersonBeautifier or Destroyer: Tuberculosis in Two PaintingsSend us a textWe 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 Grey, Lady Manners, and work through how it conveys the convergence of TB clinical manifestations with beauty ideals at the time.Links:Here are the...
2023-01-1949 min
Pharmacist's VoiceThe Oath of a PharmacistToday, we're talking about the Oath of a Pharmacist. Why? Because this is the last episode of 2022, and the end of the year is always a good time to reflect on the past. I graduated with my BS Pharm from the University of Toledo on May 12, 2001. On that day, one of my pharmacology professors (Dr. Gerald Sherman) administered the oath of a pharmacist to my class. Although I don't remember graduation day in great detail, I reviewed The Oath to prepare for this podcast episode. The oath was first developed in 1983. It was revised in 1994, 2007, and 20...
2022-12-3012 minThe Clinic & The PersonSix Kopeks or Your Life: Two Short Stories about Health Care Professionalism and AccessSend us a textWe 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, and the other story is Raymond Chandler’s It’s All Right – He Only Died, written in the late 1950s and found in 2017. A throughline from these st...
2022-12-1647 minThe Clinic & The PersonSweet Sand of Time: James Dickey’s poem Diabetes with Guest Dr. Jack CoulehanSend us a textWe 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 individuals. In addition to providing his perspectives on how the poem expands on the biomedical components of diabetes in recognizing effects such as fear, anxiety, frustration, and oppression, Dr. Coulehan recounts how he has used th...
2022-11-2755 minThe Clinic & The PersonWhen the Bolt Touches Flesh: Living with Epileptic SeizuresSend us a textWhat 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 from classic biomedical text, and offer thoughts on how they can expand the understanding of the ways epileptic seizures affect the lives of those who suffer from them, and re...
2022-10-1247 minThe Clinic & The PersonHoles and Lobotomies: Seeing and Feeling MigraineSend us a textWe 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, functioning, and health care consumption. We muse about how these literary texts and others like them can be applied in helping people who suffer migraines and in helping people who care for them.Addi...
2022-09-2241 minThe Clinic & The PersonIntroducing The Clinic & The PersonSend us a textIntroducing 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 tell how their professional careers motivated them to create the podcast. Executive producer: Anne BentleyFor a preview of some – not all – of the topics and content that the podcast will cover, see Russell Teagarden's blog, Accordi...
2022-09-1506 min