Wellcome Collection
We may begin by submitting that suffering and illness are not incidental to an accident happening to the otherwise vital and prosperous course of an individual’s life but are part and parcel of life, an inherent condition of its unfurling.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka*
In this section I mine the arts for works that place attention on what people and populations go through when they encounter health problems that produce illnesses. I look in particular for works that go beyond medical and scientific descriptions and offer explanations for them that are more easily comprehended and better felt. I also look in particular for those works that elaborate on medical and scientific explanations of what is happening with certain illness phenomena, such as the confusion of dementia, the seizures of epilepsy, the breathlessness of emphysema. And, I especially look for works that show how contending with disease and illness is a part of the human condition.
My efforts are aimed at anyone interested in what the arts bring to understanding illness situations as they are experienced, and so I am trying to make what I produce illuminating and useful to all who visit, who could be people with illnesses, their families, their caregivers, health care professionals, students in the health professions, scientists, fiction and nonfiction writers, journalists, and scholars in both the humanities and sciences.
With illness being the being the primary focus of my endeavor, I provide a post on what I consider as illness and how it can be distinguished from disease and sickness. The specific content I bring from the arts in this section is placed into one of four categories in this section: 1) What These Works Say; 2) Projects So That I Can Say More; 3) What I and Others Say; and 4) Just Saying.
What These Works Say comprises reviews of works from any applicable genre—literature, art, film, theater, music, history, journalism among others. Reviews consist of three sections: 1) my 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); 3) how the work explains or renders the illness experiences or disease processes it covers (Analysis).
What I and Others Say constitutes observations I and others have made concerning what the arts say about disease and illness experiences and consequences. These observations can take the form of original opinions, notices about viewpoints outside of According to the Arts, or incidental findings from obscure sources that capture illness experiences not available elsewhere or otherwise incomparable to the same insights from more mainstream sources.
Projects So That I Can Say More are initiatives I undertake to gain deeper insights into particular disease and illness situations. These generally involve analyses that are developed from many sources relevant to a particular inquiry. For example, an analysis could compare and contrast the different ways in which the experience of dementia is rendered in literary fiction, the different ways the aura of migraine is rendered in paintings, the different ways anxiety has been conceptualized socially over the centuries.
Just Saying comprises brief observations linking ideas or renderings from the arts with illness experiences. These observations do not need a lot of context or explanation and can, therefore, stand on their own. They can take the form of quotes, excerpts, pictures, movie clips, or other art forms.
*Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. “Illness, Life, and the Human Condition.” In Life Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition: Medicine and Philosophy in a Dialogue. Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Evandro Agazzi, xv-xxi. Milan, Italy: Kluwers Academic, 1998.