The Clinic & The Person
J. Russell Teagarden & Daniel Albrant
The Clinic and The Person is a podcast developed to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide. We are guided by how physician-writer Iona Heath sees the arts adding a view to biomedicine “that falls from a slightly different direction revealing subtly different detail” and how that view applies to particular health care situations. Our aim is to surface these views, and our desire is to present them in ways that encourage and enable health care professionals to fully engage, to consider all sources, not just biomedical, in their roles helping people with their particular health problems.
“The Clinic” represents all that Biomedicine brings to bear on disease processes and treatment protocols, and “The Person,” represents all that people experience from health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities—any genre—that relate directly to how people are affected by specific clinical events such as migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, and dementia, and by specific health care situations such as restricted access to care and gut-wrenching, life and death choices. We analyze and interpret featured works and provide thoughts on how they apply in patient care and support; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural influences and reactions.
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Top 10 The Clinic & The Person Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Clinic & The Person episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Clinic & The Person for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Clinic & The Person episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Sweet Sand of Time: James Dickey’s poem Diabetes with Guest Dr. Jack Coulehan
The Clinic & The Person
11/27/22 • 55 min
We feature James Dickey’s poem, Diabetes, with our guest, the renowned physician-poet Dr. Jack Coulehan. We discuss insights the poem offers about the trajectory of type 2 diabetes from the time of symptom onset until the time a balance is achieved between maximum compliance with disease management requirements and the compromises an acceptable lifestyle can necessitate for many individuals. In addition to providing his perspectives on how the poem expands on the biomedical components of diabetes in recognizing effects such as fear, anxiety, frustration, and oppression, Dr. Coulehan recounts how he has used this poem and others in teaching medical students and residents. He also tells stories of particular instances in which he used poetry as part of the care he provided certain patients, and as a way to connect with them.
Links:
Dr. Jack Coulehan’s bio at Stonybrook University is here.
The poem, Diabetes, and the comparative biomedical text discussed can be seen here in Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts.
Dr. Coulehan’s poem, I’m Gonna Slap Those Doctors, which was central to one of the stories he told, can be accessed here. And, his poem, The Man with Stars Inside Him, which was central to another story he told, can be accessed here.
In this episode, we make a distinction between illness as the subjective perceptions of a health problem and disease as the pathological basis of a health problem. This distinction is explained in much greater depth here in According to the Arts.
The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, a great source for Humanities works related to disease, illness, and health care, is found here.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
He Wants to Itch at It: A Novel, Play, and Movie Imagining Dementia
The Clinic & The Person
10/27/23 • 54 min
What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.
Featured Content Sources:
- The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
- The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
- The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services.
Links:
Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts:
- The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
- The Father: the play and the movie
Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.
Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.
Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia:
- Patrick Fox. From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
- Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Six Kopeks or Your Life: Two Short Stories about Health Care Professionalism and Access
The Clinic & The Person
12/16/22 • 47 min
We draw from two short stories published long ago, but recently discovered, that help us discern whether current problems associated with professionalism in health care and access to health care are unique to our time, or whether they have always been with us in one form or another. One of the stories is Anton Chekhov’s At the Pharmacy, written in 1885 and found in the late 1990s, and the other story is Raymond Chandler’s It’s All Right – He Only Died, written in the late 1950s and found in 2017. A throughline from these stories led us to the classic, 1978 satirical novel, The House of God, by Samuel Shem. We consider its importance to health care professionalism at the time—including our own professional behavior—and whether its influence persists. We conclude musing about how the perspectives these sources offer can be used in modern-day health care.
Links:
See Russell Teagarden’s blog postings at According to the Arts for further analysis of the short stories featured in this podcast, At the Pharmacy (Chekhov) and It’s All Right – He Only Died (Chandler).
At the Pharmacy is included in the anthology, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories, as is the story of how the translator, Peter Constantine, found these unpublished works more than a century after they were written. An online version of At the Pharmacy is published in the weekly newsletter, Falltide.
It’s All Right – He Only Died, was published in The Strand Magazine, along with the story of its discovery sixty years after it was first written.
The version of The House of God we referenced in the podcast is the Berkley trade paperback edition, 2010.
After the podcast was released, the New York Times published an investigative report concerning the operation of the New York University emergency department on December 22, 2022 indicating that what Chandler described in his short story is still in practice. And a Kaiser Family Foundation report published on December 21, 2022 concerning the policies and practices many individual hospitals apply in collecting money their patients owe them shows how the issues raised in Chekhov's story still exist.
Also:
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at https://www.theclinicandtheperson.com.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
What Desire Will Shape a World We’re Left?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail on Covid
The Clinic & The Person
04/03/24 • 54 min
Four years after the Covid pandemic began, as daily life has returned in large measure to its pre-pandemic shape, assessments and reflections about how the pandemic was able to wreak such havoc and how it could be prevented from occurring again are coming forth. Many are technocratic in nature and assume our aims and pursuits will remain the same as before. Micheal O’Siadhail (pronounced mee-hawl o’sheel), in his new book of poems, Desire, says that in addition to technocratic responses to the pandemic (and other threats to civilization covered in the book), we should give serious thought to what we desire. We talk to O’Siadhail about this idea and he reads selected poems from the book that characterize many aspects of what the pandemic put people through collectively and individually. He also talks about how the forms of his poetry convey his thoughts just as his words do, and how poetry, through syntax, sound, meter, and intensity, can add clarity and effectiveness to prosaic prose communicating complex concepts.
Citation:
Micheal O’Siadhail. Desire. Waco, Tx; Baylor University Press, 2023.
Links:
Micheal O’Siadhail’s website.
Russell Teagarden’s relevant blog pieces in According to the Arts:
Previous podcast episode with Micheal O’Siadhail featuring his poems recounting his late wife’s final years with Parkinson’s disease.
Thanks to Micheal O’Siadhail for bringing his enlightened perspectives on what we experienced with Covid through the piercing poetry in his book, Desire.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Illness as Exile in the Greek Tragedy Philoctetes with Paul Ranelli
The Clinic & The Person
08/29/24 • 49 min
Greek tragedies often concern identifiable and universal problems humans have confronted over the millennia. Among these problems are those illness and suffering create. In this episode we draw from Sophocles’ play, Philoctetes, and in particular, how it depicts illness as exile. With our guest, Professor Paul Ranelli, we first cover the characteristics of Greek tragedies that are applicable to illness and suffering (i.e., enduring relevance, catharsis, empathy). We then cover the play, Philoctetes, what it tells about illness as exile, and how it connects to more recent writings on the concept (e.g., Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag). Lastly, Paul Ranelli talks about an initiative he was involved in with the University of Minnesota Department of Theater Arts and Dance, the Center for the Art of Medicine, the College of Pharmacy Center for Orphan Drug Research, and the playwright Kevin Kling. This collaboration developed and staged an adaptation of Philocteteshighlighting challenges rare diseases pose. Paul describes how it was conceived, developed, produced, and performed. He also talks about how patients, families, students, health care professionals, and others received it. Spoiler alert: they loved it and saw great value in the endeavor.
Primary source
Sophocles. Philoctetes; In The Complete Greek Tragedies, Sophocles II, translated by David Grene; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Secondary sources
Virginia Woolf. On Being Ill; Ashfield, Ma: Paris Press, 2002.
Susan Sontag. Illness as Metaphor; New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Drew Leder. Illness as Exile: Sophocles’ Philoctetes; Literature and Medicine. 1990(1):1-11.
Vassiliki Kampourelli. Historical empathy and medicine: Pathography and empathy in Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. 2022:25:561–575.
Cynda H Rushton, Bryan Doerries, Jeremy Greene, Gail Geller. Dramatic interventions in the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet. 2020 (Vol 396):305-306.
Links
Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Philoctetes as prologue to current day issues involving illness as exile, pain, ethics, and moral injury.
Video of Theater of War Productions dramatic reading of Philoctetes performed January 9, 2923.
Video of the play RARE, the University of Minnesota adaptation of Philoctetes.
Video of documentary on development of the play.
Thanks to Dr. Paul Ranelli for his contributing is knowledge, expertise, and wit to this episode.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
A Lifespan the Length of a Dog’s: Illness as Loss in the Novel So Much For That
The Clinic & The Person
03/21/23 • 47 min
We consider “illness as loss” through three different scenarios from Lionel Shriver’s novel, So Much For That. The three scenarios are: sociopsychological, financial, and clinical. We focus on how the literary novel form isolates these scenarios and offers fully reflective accounts of how people can be affected by them. We also note how literary fiction can be the only or best medium for subjects often too sensitive for public forums such as whether money can be an object in health care decisions. We spend some time distinguishing illness as what people experience subjectively from a particular health problem, and disease as the pathophysiological basis for a particular health problem. Dan talks about how illness as loss is a useful concept for discerning the help people may need, and how using the word “loss” can be a valuable tool for helping them.
Citation:
Shriver L. So Much For That. New York; HarperCollins, 2010.
Links:
Russell Teagarden's blog pieces mentioned in the podcast:
- Review of So Much For That
- A comparison of biomedical and literary descriptions of familial dysautonomia
- Distinguishing disease, illness, and sickness
- Elements of illness
- Illness as loss
Recommendations:
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby (memoir and movie)
- On His Blindness, John Milton, poem, recommended by inhouse rhetorician and literary editor, Alexis Teagarden
- Rick Beato interview with Keith Jarret, recommended by inhouse musical director and cultural editor, Benedict Teagarden
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Andrew Leland’s Country of the Blind: It’s the Same World
The Clinic & The Person
05/10/24 • 53 min
Andrew Leland is a major figure as a writer, editor, producer, teacher, and podcaster across the mainstream American cultural landscape. He has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Radiolab, The Organist, and 99% Invisible among other respected sources, and has taught at prestigious universities. Amidst it all, he has been progressing towards blindness as a result of retinitis pigmentosa. As his sight diminished to the extent he needed assistance, Leland became motivated to investigate what the world would be for him when his sight was all but gone. In his book, The Country of the Blind, he reports his findings and conclusions. He shares this title with the H.G. Wells story he uses as a touchstone and through line. Cohosts Russell Teagarden and Dan Albrant talk about what can be drawn from Leland’s experiences and from the writers and artists he calls mentors, and how he expects his world will be the same when he is blind as it was before.
Citation:
Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind, New York, Penguin Press, 2023. (The paperback edition will be available on July 23, 2024).
Links:
- Andrew Leland’s website.
- Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Andrew Leland’s book, The Country of the Blind.
- A pdf of H.G. Wells’ story, The Country of the Blind.
- Trailer for the Apple TV+ series, See.
- Video clip from Seinfeld featuring Kramer acting as patient for medical students.
- Video clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail about burning the witch.
Thanks to Andrew Leland for permission to use a clip from the audio edition of his book, The Country of the Blind.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
When the Bolt Touches Flesh: Living with Epileptic Seizures
The Clinic & The Person
10/12/22 • 47 min
What can it be like to have epileptic seizures? We draw from four sources—a memoir, two novels, and a movie. In particular, we the cover how these sources depict convulsive seizure events as people may experience them, the physical and mental harm they can produce, and the adaptations to daily activities and life plans they motivate. We compare these renderings with a description from classic biomedical text, and offer thoughts on how they can expand the understanding of the ways epileptic seizures affect the lives of those who suffer from them, and reveal possibilities for better lives they could achieve.
Bibliographic information on featured episode sources:
Eichenwald K. A Mind Unraveled. New York, Ballantine Books, 2018.
Dostoevsky F. The Idiot. Oxford, Oxford World Classics, 1992.
Harding P. Tinkers. New York, Bellevue Literary Press. 2009.
Higgins B. Electricity. Stone City Films. 2014.
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, 21st ed, New York, McGraw Hill, 2022.
Additional text on the comparison between literary and biomedical text covering generalized tonic-clonic seizures, including a mapping of literary and biomedical texts for the different components of a seizure, is posted here at According to the Arts.
Other books to consider on the topic of how people experience epileptic seizures:
David B. Epileptic. New York, Pantheon Books, 2005. (graphic novel)
Fadiman A. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York, Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 1997. (nonfiction)
Send us comments, recommendations, and questions at: [email protected].
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Subscribe to The Clinic & The Person at wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at https://www.theclinicandtheperson.com.
Heal Me: Childhood Trauma in The Who’s Tommy with Dr. Anthony Tobia
The Clinic & The Person
10/01/24 • 47 min
When the British band, The Who, released their double album, Tommy, in 1969, many of the songs in it became instant classics and served as anthems for the Baby Boomer generation ever since. The album was characterized as a “rock opera,” because when connected, the songs told the story of the “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy. The storyline made possible subsequent musicals, first as a movie in 1975, and then as a Broadway play in 1993 and as a revival in 2024. Underlying the storyline in each of these genres are the psychiatric consequences of childhood trauma Tommy experiences. In this episode, we consider the psychiatric conditions Tommy exhibits through selected songs from the original Broadway production, and how they are used in education and training.
Joining us for this purpose is Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the regional chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine there. His interests and scholarly work include the value and application of merging popular culture and psychiatry. The Who’s Tommy is among the many cultural works he has found helpful in depicting psychiatric problems for purposes of teaching health professions students and practitioners, and others in roles helping people with mental illness.
Links:
Original Broadway cast album of The Who’s Tommy, 1993
Background on The Who’s Tommy movie, 1975.
The video of Dr. Tobia’s psychiatry grand rounds on the Phantom of the Opera mentioned in the podcast.
Reddit 31 Knights of Halloween didactic at Rutgers during October.
Thanks to Benedict Teagarden, podcast music and culture director, for pointers on how the harmonization in See Me, Feel Me contributes to the meaning of the lyrics.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
“We Give Up Living, Just to Keep Alive”: Three Essayists on Health Care Decisions
The Clinic & The Person
11/14/24 • 52 min
The scope and intensity of health care products and services available today make it necessary for us to have thoughts about how much of our way of life we would be willing to give up for them. Finding the balance that works for people is a daunting task. They feel the gravitational pull of health care providers and related industries, and they face the pressures family, friends, and cultural attitudes and expectations can put on them to use all the health care services available. We consider this subject as three essayists thought about it. The essayists are Barbara Ehrenreich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Michel de Montaigne. We identify some of these forces and discuss how the essayists reacted to them in their writings.
Primary Sources:
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer; Twelve, 2018.
Emanuel, Ezekiel J. "Why I Hope to Die at 75." The Atlantic, Oct. 2014.
de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame, introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Everyman's Library; Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Links:
- Website for the Hartford HealthCare Elevate Health “series of 1-minute informational segments about health topics” heard on Connecticut Public Radio.
- The recently-published novel from which the last audio clip was taken is Blood Test, written by Charles Baxter and published in 2024 by Pantheon Books. Russell Teagarden's blog piece on novel.
- Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
- Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on Montaigne’s essays covering his thoughts on doctors and health care services.
- Ezekiel Emanuel’s website.
- Ezekiel Emanuel’s 2014 article in The Atlantic (behind paywall).
- Ezekiel Emanuel’s appearance on news show where he updates his position on how he manages his health care.
- PDF of Montaigne’s collected essays (Project Gutenberg)
The next episode will feature Luke Fildes’ painting, The Doctor (1891) with Hannah Darvin from Queen’s University in Toronto, Canada. Here is the link to the painting from the Tate Britain Museum in London, England. We will focus on how the painting has been viewed as a work of art and how it has served as an ideal of medicine when it was created and since.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your
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FAQ
How many episodes does The Clinic & The Person have?
The Clinic & The Person currently has 25 episodes available.
What topics does The Clinic & The Person cover?
The podcast is about Health & Fitness, Humanities, Medicine, Podcasts and Health.
What is the most popular episode on The Clinic & The Person?
The episode title 'I Hold You Still?: Poet Micheal O’Siadhail Explains Parkinson’s Disease in Sonnets' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The Clinic & The Person?
The average episode length on The Clinic & The Person is 49 minutes.
How often are episodes of The Clinic & The Person released?
Episodes of The Clinic & The Person are typically released every 33 days, 7 hours.
When was the first episode of The Clinic & The Person?
The first episode of The Clinic & The Person was released on Sep 15, 2022.
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