Robert Frost’s Poem “Out, Out—” & The Banality of Health Care
According to the art: The futility of twentieth century health care expressed in Robert Frost’s poem “Out Out—” has become the banality of twenty-first century health care.
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.
This is Your Mind on Plants
According to the Art: Michael Pollan continues pursuing his interest in the human drive for altering consciousness through mind-altering substances he started with his previous book, and marries this interest with his passion for plants and gardening. In this book, he investigates through personal experience, opium, caffeine, and mescaline.
Should We Stay or Should We Go
According to the art: The book has entertainment value, to be sure. Readers of a certain age will further appreciate the book for the questions it raises and the thinking it inspires about taking measures to avoid devastating enfeeblement and infirmity during old age.
Reading Foucault’s
The Birth of the Clinic in 2021:
Does the Gaze Still Dominate its Masters?
According to the art: Foucault’s “gaze” determined medical knowledge and affected doctors’ practices – dominated them. I consider whether the gaze still dominates almost sixty years after Foucault first proposed it.
Edvard Munch:
Painting the Soul
According to the art: If the soul is where feelings and emotions reside, then the soul is where the Norwegian expressionist painter, Edvard Munch, visited and is the source for many of his paintings, particularly those he grouped as a series he called: The Frieze of Life: A Poem of Life, Love and Death.
Joji
According to the art: As the first major movie featuring Covid-19, it plays a minor role in the plot and infers the time it is set.
Tourette Syndrome:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Here I compare biomedical and literary text describing Tourette syndrome. The biomedical text from a neurology journal describes the characteristic tics and behaviors while the literary text from a Jonathan Lethem novel more vividly describes signs and symptoms, and describes how Tourette syndrome can affect lives.
How The Plague Spreads:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: I juxtapose a compressed biomedical explanation of how the plague spreads from a prominent medical journal with excerpts from O’Farrell’s novel where she describes how the plague reached and infected her two young characters.
The Father
(Movie)
According to the art: Florian Zeller, the screenwriter and director, admits he wants viewers feeling what people with dementia feel. He succeeds in the movie as he succeeded in the Broadway play version preceding it.
Motherless Brooklyn
According to the Art: From this novel, we get a view—Lethem’s—of how Tourette syndrome can affect everyday life and how it can progress; how people with the syndrome can think about it; the balance people seek between benefits and side effects of drug therapies; and whether it’s acceptable to think that some verbal and physical tics are funny.