The posts in What These Works Say comprise reviews and analyses of works from the Humanities selected for their focus on illness experiences beyond what biomedical sources typically provide. The works selected address both the experience of illness diseases and disorders cause (e.g., pain, disability, disorientation), and related challenges (e.g., health care access, psychological manifestations, relationship disruptions). The posts consist of three sections: 1) a brief take on the key perspectives the work offers about disease and illness (According to the Arts); 2) a summary of the whole work (Synopsis); and 3) how the work renders, explains, or expands on the illness experiences or disease processes it covers (Analysis).
According to the art: Through the story of four college friends over many years with one of them drawing most of the novel’s attention, the book provides poignant, breathtaking, and enlightening renderings of profound mental and psychological suffering resulting from abandonment, pedophilia, self-mutilation, rare neurological disease, and the futility health care systems generate for people who need them.
According to the art: Illich argues that health care as a social organization does more to hinder equality and opportunity for individuals than to improve the chances for them. He builds his argument around the concept of iatrogenesis (harm from health care), and discerns three forms of it: clinical, social, and cultural.
According to the art: Through the use of speculative fiction, the author explores how we might react when we can have no doubt about someone else’s pain, injury, or disease.
According to the Art: The book examines several components of American health care to isolate specific causes for the financial toxicity people are experiencing, and offers ideas to help health care consumers, providers, policy experts, and legislators.
According to the Art: Emanuel builds the book around twelve transformational practices as developed and applied in the several different health care organizations he studied that could potentially deliver higher-quality and lower-cost care for Americans.
According to the Art: This memoir offers more than how Jauhar became disillusioned with American health care. Along with Jauhar’s lament are insights for other memoirists, practicing physicians, parents who want their children to become physicians, consumers of health care, and health care policy analysts among others.
According to the Art: Kandel’s aim is more than just explaining how reductionism is used in brain science and in modern art. He is also out to show in a larger sense how science and the arts, which now exist as “two cultures,” are more alike than not.
According to the art: The play is the story of a real-life, eighteenth–century king of Spain and his mental illness that is tamed only when his castrato sings to him. Though the play has historical interest in itself, it highlights the concept of “medical eros” and how it can be distinguished from “medical logos.”
According to he art: Barbara Ehrenreich evaluates the balance between doing all that’s thought to be important to extending life and the time and energy it takes. She does this from the perspective of a person who is in her mid seventies (“old enough to die”) and healthy. She finds a balance that works for her but is at odds with what Biomedicine and related industries would have her do.
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.