The posts in What These Works Say comprise reviews and analyses of works from the Humanities selected for their focus on illness experiences beyond what biomedical sources typically provide. The works selected address both the experience of illness diseases and disorders cause (e.g., pain, disability, disorientation), and related challenges (e.g., health care access, psychological manifestations, relationship disruptions). The posts consist of three sections: 1) a 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); and 3) how the work renders, explains, or expands on the illness experiences or disease processes it covers (Analysis).
According to the Art: This memoir offers more than how Jauhar became disillusioned with American health care. Along with Jauhar’s lament are insights for other memoirists, practicing physicians, parents who want their children to become physicians, consumers of health care, and health care policy analysts among others.
According to the Art: Kandel’s aim is more than just explaining how reductionism is used in brain science and in modern art. He is also out to show in a larger sense how science and the arts, which now exist as “two cultures,” are more alike than not.
According to the art: The play is the story of a real-life, eighteenth–century king of Spain and his mental illness that is tamed only when his castrato sings to him. Though the play has historical interest in itself, it highlights the concept of “medical eros” and how it can be distinguished from “medical logos.”
According to he art: Barbara Ehrenreich evaluates the balance between doing all that’s thought to be important to extending life and the time and energy it takes. She does this from the perspective of a person who is in her mid seventies (“old enough to die”) and healthy. She finds a balance that works for her but is at odds with what Biomedicine and related industries would have her do.
This book is an exposé of the vulnerability that exists in advanced, western, democratic societies to trumped up arguments that can topple scientific evidence revealing urgent needs of individuals, societies, and nations, and can frustrate their solutions.
This documentary film is based from Andrew Solomon’s book of the same title. The film looks at several families in which the children produced were not what were expected and how the parents worked to accept these children and to find happiness to the degree they could.
In her novel set in the Amazonian jungle, Ann Patchett offers complex questions to contemplate for readers interested in the wisdom of enabling fertility in later life, the ethics of human subjects research involving indigenous populations, and the propriety of certain conduct scientists defend using a form of casuistry.
Michael Pollan, a journalist who is known for his work on food, takes on mind-altering drugs, or more specifically, psychedelics. From his research, interviews, and personal experiences, Pollan is enthusiastic about the potential benefits psychedelics offer individuals who are healthy or sick, and societies that are stable or fractious. But, how is this to be done?
Richard Holmes refers to this book as his “account of the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.” The book makes a call for a reuniting of the sciences and the arts, which Medical Humanities attempts to answer.
According to the art: The filmmaker follows the experience his mother has with Alzheimer’s disease over the course of about three years. Included are interviews with his mother, father, and siblings, as well as some of his mother’s longtime friends. The filmmaker splices in family movies spanning three generations reveals how the trajectory of his mother’s life changes as a result of her dementia, and shows personality traits that survived it. A more distant view of the film captures the dementia experience for a devoted, affluent, white, American family.