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
When the Bolt Touches Flesh: Living with Epileptic Seizures
What can it be like to have epileptic seizures? We draw from four sources—a memoir, two novels, and a movie. In particular, we the cover how these sources depict convulsive seizure events as people may experience them, the physical and mental harm they can produce, and the adaptations to daily activities and life plans they motivate. We compare these renderings with a description from classic biomedical text, and offer thoughts on how they can expand the understanding of the ways epileptic seizures affect the lives of those who suffer from them, and reveal possibilities for better lives they could achieve.
Bibliographic information on featured episode sources:
Eichenwald K. A Mind Unraveled. New York, Ballantine Books, 2018.
Dostoevsky F. The Idiot. Oxford, Oxford World Classics, 1992.
Harding P. Tinkers. New York, Bellevue Literary Press. 2009.
Higgins B. Electricity. Stone City Films. 2014.
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, 21st ed, New York, McGraw Hill, 2022.
Additional text on the comparison between literary and biomedical text covering generalized tonic-clonic seizures, including a mapping of literary and biomedical texts for the different components of a seizure, is posted here at According to the Arts.
Other books to consider on the topic of how people experience epileptic seizures:
David B. Epileptic. New York, Pantheon Books, 2005. (graphic novel)
Fadiman A. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York, Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 1997. (nonfiction)
Send us comments, recommendations, and questions at: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Subscribe to The Clinic & The Person at wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at https://www.theclinicandtheperson.com.
