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).
Through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops, this play gives the audience a sense of the dementia experience, not just a view of it. The audience at times has as much trouble as the character with dementia discerning fact from fiction, past from present, and here from there.
According to the art: This TV series portrays the health care a New York City hospital provided to its patients in the early 1900s. It shows what were then considered important advances in society, culture, technology, and medicine, many of which were later considered dangerous, unethical, barbaric, inhumane, and racist. The series pointedly asks whether all eras, including the era when it was created are doomed to be seen that way.
According to the art: Franzen looks back to describe his father’s experience with progressive dementia, while worrying that his memories may be unreliable––yielding a literary meta-analysis of failing memory through inherent memory failings. He thus questions whether memory loss with age is more natural than pathological.
According to the art: Through his main character, Mosley imagines what it could be like to experience dementia, and also to have a sense that you are experiencing it. He also challenges us to think about how dementia should be treated and about access to experimental drugs without regulatory oversight.
According to the art: This movie asks viewers to consider the boundaries of love (amour), or even if there are any when it comes to ending the suffering of a deeply loved spouse.
According to the art: The Norwegian, expressionist painter Edvard Munch saw a lot of illness and death in his family. In this painting, he shows us a moment preceding the death of his sister while she is attended to by a distraught aunt. He may also be showing us his sister consoling their aunt.
According to the art: At its core, this novel is about money and health care, and in particular about whether money should ever be an object in health care decisions for patients. Running through the novel is a theme of illness as loss, as it takes different forms: financial loss, loss of control, loss of self, loss of relationships, and loss of meaning.
According to the art: The book is a memoir based on seventeen near-death events involving the author, and in a few instances, her children. Though the events make for harrowing and interesting tales, they are written such that they also convey what it’s like to nearly die from different acute illnesses, accidents, violence, and bad judgment. Collectively, the stories show the availability of human resilience in the face of repeated threats to life.
According to the art: In this literary memoir of his opium addiction, Thomas De Quincey writes of the pleasures and pains opium brought him over an eighteen–year period during the early 1800s. His experiences foretell journalistic accounts of the opioid addiction crises that occurred two hundred years later.
According to the art: Sandeep Jauhar describes a select set of historical events that tend toward the triumphant while leaving aside some of the reversals and catastrophes that have historical importance. His views of future advances in cardiology are pessimistic even as cellular and gene therapies are moving into clinical trials at the time he writes this book.