“The clinic and the person” is a podcast series that follows Russell Teagarden’s blog “According to the Arts,” in which he juxtaposes clinical descriptions of illness and disability with literary texts about characters who live with those conditions. In the podcast, he and another medical professional discuss the condition that is the focus of each episode based on their medical experience, and react to the literary text as attentive, sensitive readers. This episode based on the novel, So Much for That, brings discussion of various ways catastrophic illness puts an end to a family’s plans: economically, physically, socially. The website describes the goal of the series as: “developed to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide. … The Clinic represents all that Biomedicine brings to bear on disease processes and treatment protocols, and The Person, represents all that people experience from health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities–any genres that relate directly to how people are affected by specific clinical events such as migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, and dementia, and by specific health care situations such as restricted access to care and gut-wrenching, life and death choices. We analyze and interpret featured works and provide thoughts on how they apply in patient care and support; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural influences and reactions.”
