Medical Nihilism
According to the art: Stegenga offers a book-length and formal philosophical explanation using Bayes Theorem on why “we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions.”
J. Russell Teagarden
Russell Teagarden came to his interest in applying insights from the humanities to biomedicine after decades in clinical pharmacy practice and research. He realized that biosciences explained how diseases and treatments work, but not how they affect people in their everyday lives. Through formal academic studies and independent research in the humanities, he discovered rich and abundant sources of knowledge and perspectives on how specific health problems and clinical scenarios can be better understood than from the biosciences only. He shares these discoveries through his blog, According to the Arts, and the podcast, The Clinic & The Person.
Vera Drake:
When Motivation is Virtue
According to the art: The director Mike Leigh is asking viewers to consider more than whether abortion is right or wrong prima facie. He is forcing viewers to bring in motive as a qualifying factor to the rightness and wrongness of abortion.
Retinal Hemorrhage:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: I compare a classic medical text description of a retinal hemorrhage from StatPearls with a literary description from the novel Seeing Red.
Seeing Red
According to the art: The story follows the plight of a young, diabetic woman experiencing a retinal hemorrhage and what comes after clinically and socially. What a retinal hemorrhage is like as it occurs and what the prospect of blindness is like afterward are featured. How both can become a proof of love is intertwined.
Dopesick – TV Miniseries
According to the art: To adapt Beth Macy’s expansive book about the opioid crisis to the format of a dramatic series, the creator, Danny Strong, had to limit his scope around the fiendish Purdue Pharma sales and marketing practices and the people they affected directly.
The Heart
According to the art: This novel is for readers who want to go deep into what people—family, organ recipients, hospital staff—experience during organ transplantation, from the time of an event making organ transplantation possible to the time a donated organ is implanted. In particular, philosophical concepts and language constraints are considered.
The Problem of Alzheimer’s
According to the art: The book might have been better titled, The Problems of Alzheimer’s, to better reflect the multiple dimensions Jason Karlawish takes into account in his study of the disease. Karlawish functions more as critic than cheerleader, and more as an arbiter than polemicist. He is only a polemicist when criticizing the polemics around various controversies he considers.
An MRI Literary Image of a Guilty Conscience
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: A passage is excerpted from the novel, Nervous System, in which a character’s conscience is generated during an MRI scan.
Nervous System
According to the art: The novel is about a family making its way through life dodging obstacles in the forms of illness, injury, death, and grief. The obstacles dominate the book, and are described in unusual, clever, and striking ways.
Supernova
According to the art: The movie shows how a long-term gay couple faces the onset of dementia as any heterosexual couple does, but does not consider how it could be different.