The Illumination
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.
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back
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.
Prescription for The Future: The Twelve Transformational Practices of Highly Effective Medical Organizations
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.
Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
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.
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science:
Bridging the Two Cultures
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.
Belladonna Self-Poisoning:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Biomedical and Literary descriptions of belladonna toxicity are compared. The literary source is Daša Drndić’s novel Belladonna.
Farinelli and The King
A Play of Medical Eros
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.”
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
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.
Merchants of Doubt:
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
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.
Far From the Tree
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.