What These Works Say

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).

The Wilderness
Imagining What Dementia Could be Like

According to the art: Samantha Harvey endeavors to show the experience of Alzheimer’s dementia from early stages to end stages through a character’s life. She also imagines what it could be like for a person to realize they are progressing through dementia. The experience she imagines hinges on not just that memories and facts are unavailable, but that they can come back as independent agents to cause confusion, disorientation, and fear.

The Father
(Play)

What These Works Say

Through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops, this play gives the audience a sense of the dementia experience, not just a view of it. The audience at times has as much trouble as the character with dementia discerning fact from fiction, past from present, and here from there.

The Knick

What These Works Say

According to the art: This TV series portrays the health care a New York City hospital provided to its patients in the early 1900s.It shows that many of what were then considered important advances in society, culture, technology, and medicine, were later considered dangerous, unethical, barbaric, inhumane, and racist. The series asks whether all eras, including the era when it was created, are doomed to be seen in those ways in the future.

My Father’s Brain
Thinking About Memory Problems When Memory is a Problem

What These Works Say

According to the art: Franzen looks back to describe his father’s experience with progressive dementia, while worrying that his memories may be unreliable––yielding a literary meta-analysis of failing memory through inherent memory failings. He thus questions whether memory loss with age is more natural than pathological.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

What These Works Say

According to the art: Through his main character, Mosley imagines what it could be like to experience dementia, and also to have a sense that you are experiencing it. He also challenges us to think about how dementia should be treated and about access to experimental drugs without regulatory oversight.

Amour
Love and Immutable Boundaries

What These Works Say

According to the art: This movie asks viewers to consider the boundaries of love (amour), or even if there are any when it comes to ending the suffering of a deeply loved spouse.

The Sick Child

What These Works Say

According to the art: The Norwegian, expressionist painter Edvard Munch saw a lot of illness and death in his family. In this painting, he shows us a moment preceding the death of his sister while she is attended to by a distraught aunt. He may also be showing us his sister consoling their aunt.

So Much For That

What These Works Say

According to the art: At its core, this novel is about money and health care, and in particular about whether money should ever be an object in health care decisions for patients. Running through the novel is a theme of illness as loss, as it takes different forms: financial loss, loss of control, loss of self, loss of relationships, and loss of meaning.

I Am, I Am, I Am

What These Works Say

According to the art: The book is a memoir based on seventeen near-death events involving the author, and in a few instances, her children. Though the events make for harrowing and interesting tales, they are written such that they also convey what it’s like to nearly die from different acute illnesses, accidents, violence, and bad judgment. Collectively, the stories show the availability of human resilience in the face of repeated threats to life.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

What These Works Say

According to the art: In this literary memoir of his opium addiction, Thomas De Quincey writes of the pleasures and pains opium brought him over an eighteen–year period during the early 1800s. His experiences foretell journalistic accounts of the opioid addiction crises that occurred two hundred years later.

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