What These Works Say

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).

The Genius of Marian
A Son Films His Mother’s Dementia Journey

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.

The Faraway Nearby
Apricots, Mother’s Dementia, then Life Emergency

What These Works Say

According to the art: Through fourteen stories, Solnit tells of her experiences with her mother’s dementia, a friend’s cancer, and her own cancer. Some stories about these experiences and other stories are about other events in her life at the same time. She provides thoughts on experiencing particular illnesses, the American health care, and how illness figures in the stories of our lives.

Turn of Mind
The Mystery of Dementia Wrapped in a Mystery

What These Works Say

According to the art: This murder mystery features a prime suspect with Alzheimer’s disease and who serves as the narrator for most of the book. The suspect’s disease is advanced enough to make her an unreliable narrator and witness. Because of the author’s personal interest in dementia, the novel offers ideas on how people experience it amid complex circumstances. The author also imagines an end stage of dementia that may be more pleasant than common perceptions.

It’s All Right–He Only Died

What These Works Say

According to the art: In a 655-word short story, Raymond Chandler captures a range of problems in American health care of the late 1950s. Readers in the 2010s will recognize a similar set of problems.

T.B. Harlem

What These Works Say

According to the art: Alice Neel’s painting portrays the illness experience of tuberculous (TB) in 1940, and also conveys social determinants (poverty, malnutrition) that puts populations at risk for illnesses such as TB.

Is It All In Your Head?

What These Works Say

According to the art: Through a series of astonishing case studies from her neurology practice, O’Sullivan shows what psychosomatic illness looks like and describes how it works. She avers that illnesses can arise from pathophysiological causes or psychosomatic mechanisms, and so diagnosticians should be sure to discern which is at work in any given case as much to prevent harm as to effect a cure.

Electricity

What These Works Say

According to the art: This movie was created to render the seizure experience of people with epilepsy.; the storyline is secondary to this aim. It also shows how filmmaking can be effective in capturing the seizure experience in ways that other art forms cannot.

We Are Not Ourselves
A Family’s Trajectory, Denial, and Grace Amid Dementia

What These Works Say

According to the art: This novel covers a sixty–year span of a woman’s life and how the period during her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s disease affected the trajectory of her life as a spouse, a mother, a nurse, and a person with dreams and ambitions. Insights are offered on family relationships, daily life, and health care delivery and financing. How denial manifests and evolves is explored, and how grace can come to the fore is rendered.

In the Land of Pain

What These Works Say

According to the art: Alphonse Daudet was a nineteenth century French writer whose syphilis progressed to the late stages involving devastating neuropsychiatric effects. The book comprises notes he made about his experiences with pain, unsteadiness and paralysis, what chronic pain and illness does to personal outlooks, isolation, and relationships, and the pleasures and pains of morphine.

The Wilderness
Imagining What Dementia Could be Like

What These Works Say

According to the art: Samantha Harvey endeavors to show the experience of Alzheimer’s dementia from early stages to end stages through a character’s life. She also imagines what it could be like for a person to realize they are progressing through dementia. The experience she imagines hinges on not just that memories and facts are unavailable, but that they can come back as independent agents to cause confusion, disorientation, and fear.

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