This book is an exposé of the vulnerability that exists in advanced, western, democratic societies to trumped up arguments that can topple scientific evidence revealing urgent needs of individuals, societies, and nations, and can frustrate their solutions.
This documentary film is based from Andrew Solomon’s book of the same title. The film looks at several families in which the children produced were not what were expected and how the parents worked to accept these children and to find happiness to the degree they could.
In her novel set in the Amazonian jungle, Ann Patchett offers complex questions to contemplate for readers interested in the wisdom of enabling fertility in later life, the ethics of human subjects research involving indigenous populations, and the propriety of certain conduct scientists defend using a form of casuistry.
Michael Pollan, a journalist who is known for his work on food, takes on mind-altering drugs, or more specifically, psychedelics. From his research, interviews, and personal experiences, Pollan is enthusiastic about the potential benefits psychedelics offer individuals who are healthy or sick, and societies that are stable or fractious. But, how is this to be done?
Richard Holmes refers to this book as his “account of the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.” The book makes a call for a reuniting of the sciences and the arts, which Medical Humanities attempts to answer.
According to the art: The filmmaker follows the experience his mother has with Alzheimer’s disease over the course of about three years. Included are interviews with his mother, father, and siblings, as well as some of his mother’s longtime friends. The filmmaker splices in family movies spanning three generations reveals how the trajectory of his mother’s life changes as a result of her dementia, and shows personality traits that survived it. A more distant view of the film captures the dementia experience for a devoted, affluent, white, American family.
According to the art: The change illness can cause can be barely noticeable, hugely disruptive, or something along the range in between. But, change illness often causes. The novelist and poet, Reynolds Price wrote about the big change illness caused him.
According to the art: Through fourteen stories, Solnit tells of her experiences with her mother’s dementia, a friend’s cancer, and her own cancer. Some stories about these experiences and other stories are about other events in her life at the same time. She provides thoughts on experiencing particular illnesses, the American health care, and how illness figures in the stories of our lives.
According to the art: The illness experience is, overall, and as described by Kleinman, “like the volcano: it does not go away. It menaces. It erupts. It is out of control. One damned thing follows another.”
According to the art: Illness as loss refers the types of losses that contribute to illness as it is distinguished from disease and sickness and can include loss of confidence, loss of control, loss of innocence, and loss of omnipotence, all of which are related to some degree.