The Clinic & The Person
The Clinic & The Person is a podcast bringing knowledge and perspectives from the humanities to certain aspects of biomedicine. “The Clinic” represents all that biomedicine brings to bear on diseases and treatments, and “The Person” represents all that people go through with health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities—any genre—directly related 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 their applications in patient care; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural trends and preoccupations. Often joining us are the creators of works we feature or experts on the topics we select.
The Clinic & The Person
Reconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia Stories
The millions of families dealing with Alzheimer’s disease produce millions of their own stories. We focus on two particular elements that can be part of a family’s story about dementia. One, from a collection of autobiographical stories, centers on an adult daughter with a long-standing, and justifiable antipathy towards her mother, who nevertheless finds a way to aid her when dementia takes hold. And, while doing so, she finds a new relationship with her mother and takes delight in the personality dementia produces for a time. The other, drawn from a novel, centers on various forms of denial a wife exhibits over several years of her husband’s dementia progression.
Featured Content Sources:
Stories from, The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2014
Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014
Links:
From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts:
- The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical text
- We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas
Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
