Joji
According to the art: As the first major movie featuring Covid-19, it plays a minor role in the plot and infers the time it is set.
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.
Tourette Syndrome:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Here I compare biomedical and literary text describing Tourette syndrome. The biomedical text from a neurology journal describes the characteristic tics and behaviors while the literary text from a Jonathan Lethem novel more vividly describes signs and symptoms, and describes how Tourette syndrome can affect lives.
How The Plague Spreads:
The Biomedical and The Literary
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: I juxtapose a compressed biomedical explanation of how the plague spreads from a prominent medical journal with excerpts from O’Farrell’s novel where she describes how the plague reached and infected her two young characters.
The Father
(Movie)
According to the art: Florian Zeller, the screenwriter and director, admits he wants viewers feeling what people with dementia feel. He succeeds in the movie as he succeeded in the Broadway play version preceding it.
Motherless Brooklyn
According to the Art: From this novel, we get a view—Lethem’s—of how Tourette syndrome can affect everyday life and how it can progress; how people with the syndrome can think about it; the balance people seek between benefits and side effects of drug therapies; and whether it’s acceptable to think that some verbal and physical tics are funny.
Hamnet
According to the Art: The novel centers on the eleven-year-old son of a late sixteenth-century playwright and stage performer who died from the plague in Stratford, England. Story elements touching on medical humanities concerns include death, grief, dread, childbirth, and how plague infections spread.
Elizabeth is Missing
According to the art: The movie can be approached as a crime story with dementia as a wrinkle, or as a dementia story with crime as a wrinkle. As a movie focusing on dementia, it prompts the haunting possibility that people with advanced dementia may still possess more cognitive ability than they are credited, and that language problems dementia can cause may obscure retained recall and cognitive functions.
The Great Believers
According to the art: I was drawn to this novel because it covers the early HIV / AIDS epidemic in Chicago, which is where I was at the time. I was not disappointed as far as that goes, but found it impossible not to draw comparisons between the novel and the current coronavirus pandemic
Reading Rats, Lice and History During the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic…for Pleasure
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: This is a book to read for the charm, eloquence, erudition, humility, and humor it provides as much or more than the history of typhus covered.
Faith, Reason, and the Plague
in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany
According to the Art: Cipolla’s account of the bubonic plague striking Northern Italy in 1630 shows how epidemics drive people into opposing groups, in this case, Church and State. The 2020 pandemic shows that epidemics still drive people into opposing groups.