Ava
According to the art: Thirteen-year-olds often feel a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, and their developing brains have yet to gain control of risky impulses. This movie explores the effects of ratcheting up these anxieties and uncertainties.
J. Russell Teagarden
Russell Teagarden came to his interest in applying insights from the humanities to biomedicine after decades in clinical pharmacy practice and research. He realized that biosciences explained how diseases and treatments work, but not how they affect people in their everyday lives. Through formal academic studies and independent research in the humanities, he discovered rich and abundant sources of knowledge and perspectives on how specific health problems and clinical scenarios can be better understood than from the biosciences only. He shares these discoveries through his blog, According to the Arts, and the podcast, The Clinic & The Person.
Plague Years:
A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis
According to the art: Slotten offers perspectives both as a health care provider and as a member of an at-risk community. These perspectives are formed out of individual experiences at the bedside, in the clinic, in the classroom, and in his social relationships.
Empire of Pain:
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
According to the art: Patrick Radden Keefe goes deep into how and why the Sackler family and its company, Purdue Pharma, fueled the epidemic with its product OxyContin.
The Mountain
According to the art: The movie tells the story of a psychiatrist traveling around to asylums in the US performing lobotomies during the mid-1950s when they were falling out of favor. While familiar horrors long associated with lobotomies and asylums are shown, their purpose in the movie is conveying the dangers of overconfidence and hubris existing in the US then and now.
Demon Copperhead
According to the art: The novel works well on its own as a compelling story, but it can also serve as a companion to nonfiction books, documentary films, and investigative reports covering the opioid crisis with the expanded view it generates of how individual lives are affected in the midst of all else that threatens them.
Consumptive Chic
According to the art: The author grapples with the question: “How is it possible that a disease characterized by coughing, emaciation, relentless diarrhea, fever, and the expectoration of phlegm and blood [i.e., tuberculosis] became not only a sign of beauty, but also a fashionable disease?”
A Cancer Describes Doxorubicin
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: The novel comprises a hybrid of conventional prose, prose poetry, poetry, and graphical elements that the author puts to imaginative use describing how the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin works.
The Mouth Agape
According to the art: “When bad things happen to good people” is a common trope used in movies featuring the loss of a family member to cancer, or any disease. Something closer to bad things happen to not-so-good people is at work in this movie.
Never Let Me Go
According the the art: The novel can be read as simply a dystopian story. But it can also be read as an ethical analysis of human cloning technology applied to organ supply, whether the author, Kazuo Ishiguro, had that purpose in mind or not.
The Blindfold
According to the art: The book comprises four sections that can work together or independently of one another, but across all of them are scenes in which the main character experiences migraine headaches that provide perspectives on the physical suffering they can cause, the nature of relationships migraineurs can have with health care providers, and some of the social implications associated with chronic migraine headaches.