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.

Faith, Reason, and the Plague
in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

What These Works Say

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.

Which Country Has the
World’s Best Health Care?

What These Works Say

According to the art: The book is a compendium of health care system features common among eleven, high-income countries, which become the basis for comparing and judging them. While the analyses produced serve public health policy officials and educators best, they also provide insights into how health care, policies, practices, cultures, and histories of countries can affect illness experiences.

Emphysema:
The Biomedical and the Sick Poet

Projects So That I Can Say More

According to the art: Here, I compare a description of what people experience with emphysema from a classic biomedical text with a series of “notes” from a poet describing his experience with emphysema.

Migraine Experience:
The Biomedical and The Literary

Projects So That I Can Say More

According to the art: The experience of migraine headache is searing, its causes vexing, and its treatments unsatisfying. The condition is highly prevalent and writers, poets, and artists have rendered the experience across the millennia of civilization. Here is a comparison of some literary renderings of the migraine experience (fiction and nonfiction) with a classic biomedical text description.

Death from Late-Stage Cancer as Battle or as Grace in the Film Wit

What I and Others Say

According to the art: In this film death from late-stage cancer is considered as a battle to be waged or as a fate to be accepted through grace, and how different punctuation in John Donne’s poem, Death Be Not Proud, can help to make this distinction.

Reading The End of October
During the Pandemic of 2020

Projects So That I Can Say More

This novel, written immediately before the current pandemic, offers correspondences between a literary account with fictional analogs to figures responding to the current pandemic, adding a measure of foresight to the many previous literary depictions of human responses to plagues.

Reading The Betrothed
During the 2020 Pandemic

Projects So That I Can Say More

According to the art: The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, is a literary explication of Italian history in the early sixteen hundreds, and which includes a section on the bubonic plague that ravaged Milan then. The factual reports of public reactions to the bubonic plague in the novel are compared here to factual reports of public reactions to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in mainstream media. Not a lot changed in 400 years.

Arrowsmith

What These Works Say

According to the art: In this novel published in 1925, Sinclair Lewis offers a view of how human folly complicates application of scientific research findings, medical standards of practice, public health principles, public administration fundamentals, and good governance. He uses medical practice, public health administration, and an infectious epidemic as his case studies. His renderings remain relevant when read ninety-five years after publication.

Diabetes Experience:
The Biomedical and The Poetic

Projects So That I Can Say More

According to the art: Here is a poem that renders the initial experience of type II diabetes compared to a biomedical explanation, and how people make accommodations to biomedical necessities.

Familial Dysautonomia Experience:
The Biomedical and The Literary

Projects So That I Can Say More

According to the art: Here are excerpts from the novel So Much For That, extending or elaborating on classic biomedical explanations of what people experience with familial dysautonomia.

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