The Clinic & The Person
The Clinic and The Person is a podcast 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. We are guided by how physician-writer Iona Heath sees the arts adding a view to biomedicine “that falls from a slightly different direction revealing subtly different detail” and how that view applies to particular health care situations. Our aim is to surface these views, and our desire is to present them in ways that encourage and enable health care professionals to fully engage, to consider all sources, not just biomedical, in their roles helping people with their particular health problems.
“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 genre—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.
The Clinic & The Person
The Dose Makes the Poison: Two Novels, Two Poisons, Two Emergency Medicine Physicians
We look at two literary descriptions of self-poisoning through the novels, Belladonna and Madame Bovary, and compare them with classic biomedical texts. We focus on how vividly the literary texts depict what people can go through after having poisoned themselves with belladonna or arsenic, how well these descriptions represent or elaborate on biomedical texts and teaching, and the applications they offer to health care practitioners, students, and the general public.
We are joined by Dr. Kamna Balhara and Dr. Andrew Stolbach, both of whom are associate professors and emergency medicine physicians at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Dr. Balhara also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in French studies, is a founder and co-director of Health Humanities at Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine (H3EM), and is a member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. Dr. Stolbach is also a medical toxicologist and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Health. Better guests for this episode could not be found. Their expertise on and enthusiasm for the topic and content sources make for an engaging episode.
Links to content sources:
Literary:
Belladonna, by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New York, New Directions, 2017.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, Translated by Geoffrey Wall. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 2003.
Biomedical:
Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies, 11e. McGraw Hill; 2019.
Goodman & Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 13e, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2018.
Case study: Unseasonal severe poisoning of two adults by deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna). Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health. 2000;120(2):127-130.
The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. New York, NY: Penguin Books; 2010.
Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces on Belladonna and Madame Bovary at According to the Arts.
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
