What I and Others Say constitutes observations I and others have made about what the arts say concerning particular disease and illness experiences, and their 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.
According to the art: The fatal shooting of a health care insurance executive in December, 2004 brings to mind four movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They depicted a building rage about new restrictions to health care coverage and the methods used to apply them, that spring from underlying structures and incentives embedded in US health care.
When Montaigne considered seeking help for health problems, he considered with trepidation, the impact it would have on his habits, the reliability of medical knowledge, and the way to engage health care services.
According to the art: Thomas Kuhn’s classic book may give us a better understanding of how science works, but probably not one that helps us worry less about the reliability of medical knowledge.
According to the art: The director Mike Leigh is asking viewers to consider more than whether abortion is right or wrong prima facie. He is forcing viewers to bring in motive as a qualifying factor to the rightness and wrongness of abortion.
According to the art: Foucault’s “gaze” determined medical knowledge and affected doctors’ practices – dominated them. I consider whether the gaze still dominates almost sixty years after Foucault first proposed it.
According to the art: If the soul is where feelings and emotions reside, then the soul is where the Norwegian expressionist painter, Edvard Munch, visited and is the source for many of his paintings, particularly those he grouped as a series he called: The Frieze of Life: A Poem of Life, Love and Death.
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.
According to the art: Art genres can be fused for various purposes. I use the play The Height of the Storm as an example of when a dramatic play can be written in the jazz idiom.
According to the art: Illness as argumentation generally means that illness can be what people persuade others it is.
According to the art: The change illness can cause can be barely noticeable, hugely disruptive, or something along the range in between. But, change illness often causes. The novelist and poet, Reynolds Price wrote about the big change illness caused him.