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
Painting with Empathy: The Expressionist Art of Edvard Munch with Curator Øystein Ustvedt
While in Oslo, Norway visiting family, Russell Teagarden went to the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) to speak with Øystein Ustvedt, who is a curator and noted expert on the art of Edvard Munch. The interview concentrates on Munch’s work expressing emotional dimensions of anxiety, illness, grief, and suffering. Ustvedt talks about how Munch’s life story explains the sources for his empathy and artistic inclinations, identifies and discusses the paintings particularly effective in expressing emotions illness and suffering generate, and considers how Munch’s work could benefit health professions students and practitioners. Russell’s 5½-year-old granddaughter teaches him how to say, “National Museum” and “goodbye,” in Norwegian, with varying success.
Links:
Links to paintings discussed:
- Puberty (1894)
- The Sick Child (1885)
- Spring (1891)
- Sick Girl (Christian Krogh, 1881)
- Death in the Sickroom (1893)
- The Spanish Flu (1919)
- Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943)
- Melancholy (1892)
- The Scream (1893)
Link to Russell Teagarden’s blog piece in According to the Arts on Øystein Ustvedt’s book, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life.
Link to National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo
Thanks to Benedict Teagarden for the idea of speaking with an expert on Edvard Munch while in Oslo, and to Ingvild for the Norwegian language lessons.
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
