addiction – medhum.org

The Knick of Time

Russell Teagarden — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:40:33 +0000

Television has produced shows featuring the daily activities and dramas in medical practices from almost the beginning of television itself. Early programs, such as Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, and Dr. Welby, all weekly shows airing for many years, attracted huge audiences. Medical shows have since been a consistent offering on television, some of the better known being, St. Elsewhere, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Hope, and House. The medical series, The Pitt, represents the genre at present. Among the traits they share along with medical drama and personal drama, is being set in the era they were produced. The Knick is an exception.

The Knick portrays all that goes on in and around a hospital struggling to provide care for the poorer classes in lower Manhattan during the early 1900s. It shows that many of what were then considered important advances in medicine, technology, society, and culture were later considered dangerous, unethical, barbaric, inhumane, and racist. The series asks whether health care of any era, along with associated social and cultural factors at work, are destined to be seen sometime in the future in similar ways.

Storylines of the Poor and the Famous

The Knick was inspired by the Knickerbocker Hospital, founded in Harlem in 1862 to serve the poor. In this twenty-part television series spread over two seasons, the fictional Knick is located somewhere in the lower half of Manhattan around 1900. The time covered during the series is not marked in any distinct way. The characters do not age much, and although fashion and customs remain static during the series, the scope and significance of advancements that come into play were actually adopted over a longer time than the episodes cover.

The series builds on some known history. The central character, the chief surgeon Dr. John Thackery, is modeled on a famous surgeon of the time, Dr. William Halsted, in both his surgical adventurism and in his drug addictions. The character, Dr. Algernon Edwards, who is an African-American, Harvard-educated, and European-trained surgeon, is based in part on Dr. Louis T. Wright, who became the first African-American surgeon at Harlem Hospital during the first half of the twentieth century.  

Storylines of human drama and folly run through the series. Among them are medical cases both ordinary and bizarre, heroic successes and catastrophic failures, loves won and lost, gilded lives and wretched existences, honor and corruption, racism and more racism. Within these storylines are the scientific, medical, and industrial advances of the period, as well as the social frameworks that form fin de siècle hospital care and medical research in New York City.  

Some of the industrial advances adopted by the hospital include electrification, telephone service, and electric-powered ambulances. We see that transitions to these new technologies are not without risks and catastrophes: patients and hospital staff are electrocuted, and when the ambulance batteries died — a frequent occurrence– many of the patients they carried died, too.

Medical advances integrated into various episodes include x-rays, electric-powered suction devices, and an inflatable balloon for intrauterine compression to stop hemorrhages. Thackery is a driven researcher taking on some of the big problems of the day, such as making blood transfusions safe, curing syphilis, and discovering the physiologic mechanisms of drug addiction. We see how he learns at the cost of his patients, or rather his subjects. We also get a glimpse of movements directed at population health. For example, epidemiological methods are applied to find the source of a typhoid outbreak, which drew from the actual case of Mary Mallon (aka, Typhoid Mary). Shown juxtaposed to the advances in epidemiology is the concurrent interest that was rising in eugenics and its broad application to control for unwanted individual traits and particular groups of people. Research ethics and regulations were a long way off. 

Time Tells

Each era possesses its own hubris based on the technological advances and social progress made over those of previous eras, and on the certainty that the mistakes made before have not been repeated. Time reveals whether those attitudes and positions were justified. For Soderbergh, the director of the series, this idea was top of mind, and he stated as much in an interview published in the August 1, 2014 New York Times: 

There are so many treatments on the show that make you gasp because they’re so wrong…It just makes you wonder what treatments we’re all taking at face value that 10 or 15 years from now we’re going to be told, ‘Well, that didn’t work, and in fact that makes it worse.’ 

Early twenty-first-century medical care has benefited from advances in molecular biology, medical devices, surgical procedures, data analytics, and epidemiological methods among others. People only participate in experimental protocols with their informed consent, and health care workforces are highly diverse. Impressive indeed, but none that in any way dwarf some of the advances shown during the series, and many that make twenty-first-century medical care possible. And, while The Knick shows how patients were often victims of bad science, bad technique, unproven technology, and malfeasance, the current era of health care is rife with risks for its own harms. Based on a complex analysis from several sources, the U.S. Institute of Medicine estimated in 1999 that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die from preventable medical errors each year in the US (To Err is Human). In 2016, researchers from The Johns Hopkins University reported in the May 3, 2016 issue of The BMJ (The British Medical Journal), that at the time The Knick was running in 2014–2015, medical errors were the third leading cause of death in the U.S. While the the accuracy of these estimates could be challenged, we can take from them with some amount of certainty that medical error exists today to a significant degree.

The Knick pushes us to consider and to beware of what we may see resulting from modern-day biomedical and technological advances as time passes. To the medical drama and personal drama of most television medical serious, The Knick adds the drama of time.

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The Knick
Steven Soderberg, director
Cinemax
Twenty episodes, 2014-2015
Running time: 42–57 minute episodes

Awards
Peabody Award
Six Primetime Emmys
Three Critics Choice Television awards

The Knick began streaming on HBO Max on February 20, 2021

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Howard Trachtman — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 13:11:01 +0000

It is said that good fiction centers on three basic emotions – love, betrayal, and power – that are woven into archetypal plots — a journey in search of something real or imagined, a reversal of fortune, revelation of a mystery. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it does capture a lot of books that we enjoy reading. One feature that is not included in this scheme is social protest. Where does it fit into the world of creative writing? Can it serve as an organizing principle for a successful novel?

Demon Copperhead is nothing if not a novel centered on social concerns. It tells the story of a child born to a drug addicted mother in an oxycontin-ravaged community in western Virginia. He is delivered inside an intact amniotic sac, an anomaly that foreshadows a life-long fixation to see the ocean, any ocean. His mother has abysmal taste in men and repeatedly chooses to live with men who abuse her and physically threaten Demon. When she dies of a drug overdose, Demon is placed in foster care and forced to work countless hours as a virtual slave under horrible circumstances, without any consideration for his safety, by the person who is supposedly responsible for his wellbeing. He runs away and has a miserable encounter on the road with a streetwalker who entraps him and steals the hard-earned money that he has secretly saved and stashed away. Against all expectation, Demon reconnects with his dead father’s family, and they place him in a much more stable and secure environment – the home of the venerated coach of the local high school football team.

The coach takes a liking to Demon. He recognizes Demon’s hidden strengths and talents and encourages Demon to try out for the football team. Much to his surprise, Demon achieves star status as a tight end, no longer a faceless hillbilly from the back country of mobile homes. But true to the trajectory of the novel, Demon suffers a major injury to his knee. He refuses surgery and tries to tough it out. Pain medication is key to this strategy and, of course, this being Appalachia in the late 1990s, oxycontin is too easily prescribed by doctors and too accessible to patients. A painful decline into addiction and despair ensues. Many of Demon’s peers fall victim to the oxycontin plague. But unlike them, Demon is resilient. He is a talented artist, and from early childhood he would draw cartoon-like sketches to escape from his desultory life.

With the help and support of an art teacher who takes him under her wing during high school, Demon creates a comic strip that dramatizes life in the backwoods of Virginia and that gains regional notoriety. As the novel nears the end, there is a dramatic passage in which Demon confronts his social nemesis on a mountain ridge during a windswept rainstorm. It evokes a climactic episode in Kingsolver’s earlier prize-winning book, The Poisonwood Bible, where the life of a key character is threatened by an attack of army ants in the middle of the night. Ultimately, Demon enters drug rehabilitation, perseveres through the rigors of withdrawal, and gets clean. Against all expectations, Demon finds love and redemption. The woman of his dreams has been there all along, but when it happens, you cannot help but smile as you watch the two lovers acknowledge their feelings for one another.

The title of the novel is a dead giveaway of who inspired it and Kingsolver acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens in the postscript. Like her Victorian predecessor, Kingsolver is writing to protest the neglect and abuse that people, but especially children, living in post-manufacturing America have been forced to endure at the end of the 20^th century and into the next. In her vision, the grim experiences of people like Demon and his family, whose lives are attached to the land, are profoundly different from city dwellers. After their land was stripped of its natural resources, the rural communities in states like Virginia and Tennessee were left to languish economically and fall victim to predatory pharmaceutical companies which promoted the use of drugs that the proprietors knew would increase dependence and addiction.

There is a relentlessness to this story and Kingsolver’s voice in many respects echoes the Biblical prophets. For some readers, the book is almost too depressing. But I think that fails to give enough credit to her Dickensian style and outlook. The sequence of episodes in different locations and with a revolving cast of characters is reminiscent of the publication of Dickens’ novels in serial installments that can almost stand alone. The narrative pulsates with non-stop action and there is an optimism that Demon will always pull through. He is an engaging character, blessed with emotional reserves and intellectual gifts that enable him to overcome his baleful surroundings. In that sense, his story, like Dickens’ novels, may strike some as unrealistic. Perhaps that is the most effective way a writer can successfully enlist readers to rally to her social cause, by offering a vision of personal triumph over social and cultural adversity.

Coming back to the question I asked at the outset, can a novel inspired by social protest survive its era and outlive the conditions that spurred the author to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard? Novels like David Copperfield and The Grapes of Wrath are affirmative answers. I predict that the artistry of Demon Copperhead will ensure that it will still be read long after the environmental damage incurred by the coal mining industry and the human devastation of the opioid epidemic recede into history. Demon’s voice is so alive, his character is so engaging, and his tale is so moving that I am confident that the book will be on bookshelves or in data storage tools in a hundred years. It may be necessary to add notes to explain the ins and outs of the coal mining industry and how oxycontin was approved and marketed to an unsuspecting population, but those will be details that will not obscure the deep humanity of the book.

Oprah In Conversation with Barbara Kingsolver

DEMON COPPERHEAD
Barbara Kingsolver
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2022, 548pp

Web photo by George Hiles

The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese

Dave Hsu — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:04:21 +0000

Sports Literati X Apollo On Call

This month, on Apollo On Call, we have a special collaboration podcast to share with you. My guest co-host for this episode is Dr. Dave Bryant. We usually meet up to podcast about sports books on the Sports Literati podcast. But this month, I managed to find a sports book that deals with medical humanities that is perfect collaboration material!

The Tennis Partner is a 1998 memoir by Abraham Verghese that talks about his friendship with a troubled former professional tennis player turned medical trainee named David Smith. At the time, Verghese was an infectious disease specialist in El Paso, Texas, where David was a medical student.  Verghese’s marriage was also coming apart at the seams. Into this void enters David. Determined to test his own tennis skills against a former pro, Abraham ends up befriending David over tennis and the two become close friends. As their lives unravel, we get a multi-layered story about friendship, medicine and tennis.

Have a listen and let us know what you think! And if you are interested in more sports booksdiscussions, check us out on the Sports Literati podcast.

TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Shawn Thomas — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 18:22:16 +0000

The world as we know it can be divided into two eras – before and after 2007. This was the year that Apple released the iPhone, a revolutionary computing device which harnessed immense computing power and the connectivity of the internet into a palm-sized gadget. Today, these devices and their associated software applications have become ubiquitous and have transformed the nature of life itself.

These changes have not all been for the better. Perhaps you have noticed such unsettling changes yourself. A child in a restaurant is glued to a tablet screen, probably the last resort of a weary parent trying to enjoy their first peaceful meal in days. A group of tourists in Paris marvels at the Eiffel Tower, not as it is, but as it appears through their phone camera and on their phone screen. Neighborhoods have become quieter and less lively, as children have retreated from the streets and hunkered down at home with their phones.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, elaborates upon these ideas in his book The Anxious Generation. In this book, he describes the dual trends of increasing smartphone/screen-based engagement, driven by perverse economic incentives of technology companies, and decreasing real-world, human-to-human play, driven by over-protection from modern parents. The collision of these forces has defined Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, as the most anxious and depressed generation of our time.

In the book, Haidt notes that the tactics of technology companies to drive increased user engagement have been well documented by activists such as Tristan Harris. Much like tobacco companies in the mid to late 20^th century, modern technology companies prey on young users (e.g. children) as a source of future/recurring revenue, and fight off consumer protections through aggressive lobbying campaigns at the government level. As a result, children are spending record numbers of hours on smartphones, increasingly isolated from the real world and irritable when deprived of their digital drugs. Haidt also observes that the technology problems of girls and boys are unique. For example, girls are significantly more prone to social media addiction and the associated psychological disturbances such as distorted body image and self-worth. On the other hand, boys are much more avid users of video games and pornography, which reduce their desire for real-world play and romantic relationships.

Haidt also notes that over a longer but overlapping time period, children have been overly protected from real-world responsibilities and real-world play. He attributes these new attitudes to the changing media landscape and how crimes are portrayed in the news, as well as legal challenges which have incentivized parental overprotection. In one example, he describes a pitiful incident in which an eight-year-old child was seen walking the streets alone, and a concerned passerby called the police to report an “abandoned child.” In this case and many others, parents have been held responsible for this absurd new “crime”, a sight which would have been entirely commonplace 30 years ago. Haidt highlights the irony of how the real-world, full of rich experiences, appropriate risk-taking, and character-building responsibilities has been overly regulated by our society, whereas the digital world, rife with dangers for growing adolescent minds, has been almost entirely unchecked, unregulated, and ignored.

Bringing people out of the digital world and into the real world is a formidable task. One strategy that Haidt found success with was to encourage people to reconnect with a sense of awe in the world. Awe is a vague concept, but can be defined as a feeling of wonder inspired by the sacred or sublime. The real world is full of such awe-inspiring moments, if only we could stop to notice them. In a comically simple exercise, Haidt encouraged students in his university course to take a walk through Manhattan without their phones or headphones, and then to write about their experience on this “awe walk.” The written reflections were so beautiful that he included excerpts of his students’ work in the book to illustrate how such simple measures could have such a profound impact. One such excerpt is reproduced below:

“It was a perfect April day when the cherry trees were in full bloom. I was so overwhelmed with how beautiful the park seemed in the spring, that I took time sitting on a bench, contemplating its beauty, and finding moral delight and affection to the people I see walking around, smiling at each of them as they look at me. “

For children who have no choice but to grow up in the digital era, Haidt attempts to boil his recommendations down into four rules for a healthier childhood:

No smartphones until high school.

No social media before the age of 16.

No phones in schools.

More independence, play, and responsibility in the real world.

He recognizes that while these solutions are simple, their implementation is anything but. As a society, we face a daunting collective action problem as it pertains to technology and real-world experiences. Such problems require collective solutions, and Haidt encourages parents to get together, organize, and raise their children together in a real-world oriented manner. While broader changes in school policy may seem out of reach, Haidt encourages struggling schools to get inspired by the numerous case studies of schools that went phone-free and experienced positive changes by almost every metric, within a matter of two to three years.

Some may say that our society is too far gone to reverse these negative changes, but this is certainly not the case. In fact, people are more skeptical now than ever of the negative role of technology in our lives, and collective action on this problem may be easier now than it ever has been before. As we sit perched on the precipice of a new technological revolution in artificial intelligence, this sentiment has already garnered potent opposition to unchecked technological advance and implementation. Will we learn from our past mistakes? Unfortunately, our track record is not encouraging. Only time will tell how far we go before we decide we need a detox.

The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Press, New York City, March 26, 2024, 400 pages
Web Photo by Joel Fulgencio

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Howard Trachtman — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:14:40 +0000

Can a book be out of sync with the large themes that it grapples with? I could not escape this thought as I read Martyr!, an enthralling novel that tackles the question of what it means to live a life infused with meaning. It recounts the story of Cyrus Shams, who has grown up in Indiana after his single-parent father emigrated from Iran to America. His mother was killed when her airplane was shot out of the sky by a sea-to-air missile fired from the USS Vincennes, a real life historical event that occurred in July 1988. His grief-stricken father is employed in a factory farm in Fort Wayne killing chickens each day on a massive, industrial scale and appears to be biding his time on Earth until Cyrus leaves home and becomes independent.

Cyrus aspires to be a poet but is drowning in self-pity and drug use. He wants more than anything to achieve renown and martyrdom and to die after having made a lasting mark in the world. Interwoven with these tragic human circumstances are antic elements that collide with this depressing narrative. The novel opens abruptly with a humorous but disconcerting encounter between Cyrus, who is working as a surrogate patient in an introduction to medicine class, and a student, who is clearly in the early stages of her education. Cyrus is having a bad day and cynically takes on the role of the difficult patient, nearly driving the student to tears. There is a zany episode when Cyrus and a friend take on a home maintenance and wood chopping job for a man who lives alone and who monitors their work wearing only his underwear.

Dream sequences in which Cyrus receives guidance from figures ranging from Kareem Abdul Jabbar to a thinly disguised, now President Trump materialize without warning. An uncle, his mother’s older brother, passes through the story several times appearing as a figure draped in a black hooded cape and riding on horseback across the blood-drenched Iran-Iraq war battlefields. His mission is to reassure the dying soldiers that they will ascend to paradise. Yet, despite these disparate elements, the book has a powerful coherence and momentum. One of the most striking features of the book is its extraordinarily imaginative similes– “he was skinny in a scrawny way, not like a runner but like a mathematician who forgets to eat,” “the middle school teacher… offered him a racial slur, like a juicy orange they might peel together and share.” These phrases demand that you slow down the pace of your reading and take note of the author’s creativity.

Engagement with language and its communicative limitations emerges as a key theme of Martyr!. Cyrus comments frequently on the arbitrariness of language and the terrifying consequences that can arise from the words we use. Akbar embeds this idea in his writing by implying that plain words alone are inadequate to capture the essence of things, and the only reliable way to convey meaning to readers is by creating vivid and arresting comparisons. The plot of the book takes off when Cyrus is encouraged by a friend to go to the Brooklyn Museum and visit a featured exhibit, DEATH-SPEAK. It consists of an artist who is dying of cancer sitting on a chair and talking with the visitors about death during the final weeks of her life. An unanticipated bond is quickly established between the artist named Orkideh and Cyrus. He feels compelled to return and speak with her over the next four days. Their conversation is genuine and moving. There is more to the artist and her art than meets Cyrus’ eye, and those unexpected twists drive the story to its blazing finish.

What is one to make of this wholly original and emotionally charged novel? I will restrict myself to three thoughts that have had staying power after finishing the book a month ago. First, as mentioned above, Martyr! raises provocative questions about the limitations of language and our ability to communicate with one another. Cyrus (and Akbar) questions the capacity of words alone to express meaning, as if each of us has our own private language. If we can firmly ground our language with references to concrete, real life experiences, which is precisely what Akbar does with the beautiful and jarring similes that are interwoven into the entire book, then we may be able to convey meaning. That Akbar can introduce such a recondite idea, a variant of playing language games, into a best-selling novel is a feat worth noting.

Second, there is a yearning to be healed that drives Cyrus’ quest. Martyrdom is the outer expression, but it is a quest for meaning that is the true driving force that motivates Cyrus to take healthy action in the novel. He attends a group therapy program and has a tough-minded supervisor to help him detox from his drug use. Ultimately, it is the new awareness that Cyrus gains about his parents that enables him to achieve psychological equanimity and peace of mind.

Finally, what is the martyrdom that Cyrus longs for? He is not looking to wrap himself with explosives, kill the infidels, and gain entry to paradise. One could say that what he so desperately wants is lasting fame and renown for an act or artistic creation that will be seen as unique and cherished, that will survive after him, and that will keep his name eternally alive. The Book of Martyrs, a fictional collection of poems written by Cyrus that are interspersed in the text, could conceivably represent this hoped-for act of martyrdom. However, the ending of the novel suggests that Akbar may have a less explosive and more intimate notion of what martyrdom means. The knowledge that Cyrus gains over the course of the novel and his interactions with Orkideh spur him to finally achieve the martyrdom he seeks. His ultimate fate on the final page is actually a bit murky. But the vision that one is left with is that Cyrus has indeed achieved a life of meaning because it is a life of meaningful interpersonal connections.

Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar
Alfred A. Knopf, 2024, pp 332
Web image by Levi Meir Clancy

Interview with Poet B. Fulton Jennes

Cortney Davis — Thu, 02 May 2024 22:22:05 +0000

When I first read Blinded Birds, an award-winning collection of poetry by B. Fulton Jennes, I entered a world I assumed I knew. After a long career in nursing, I thought I was familiar with the wages of depression and addiction. But the poems in Blinded Birds took me deep into new territory, into multigenerational suffering and almost miraculous recovery. I was eager to talk with Jennes to find out more about these brave poems and her willingness to expose her family’s long hidden afflictions.

Cortney Davis: The poems in Blinded Birds are startling and sometimes difficult to read. Can you talk about the process of writing such personal poems–how you considered the idea of “truth” in poetry as you were writing?

B. Fulton Jennes: The poems in Blinded Birds are 100% autobiographical. One of the book’s reviewers called them “brutally honest,” and many people have told me they needed to stop reading to compose themselves before continuing (I guess that’s a compliment!). The intent was not to shock but, rather, to heal. For me, the only path to that healing was complete, unfiltered honesty. As we say in the program, you’re only as sick as your secrets, and I’d been holding in those poisonous secrets for far too long. Poet Anne Carson might insist that art is not therapy, but it was for me in writing these poems.

CD: Blinded Birds is your first poetry collection, but you’ve been writing award winning poems for some time. When did you begin your journey as a poet?

BFJ: When I was a child my grandmother used to read to me from my father’s copy of A Child’s Garden of Verse; I loved the rhymes and the musicality of the poems. Also, my mom wanted to be a writer when she was in high school. She used to write poems with me in the morning before I went to school. Of course, I took all the credit for them with my teacher!

CD: And now you’re writing poems that are like explosions on the page, visceral and stripped-bare. How did you come to write these particular poems? Was there a triggering event?

BFJ: It was after we discovered my daughter Mallory’s heroin addiction. Mal was home from college and preparing to begin overseas graduate studies when we found her overdosed and, essentially, dead on her bedroom floor. Fortunately, I was able to resuscitate her until the EMTs arrived, so she lived and entered a residential treatment program. But processing all that happened in the months that followed–including Mallory’s subsequent relapse and years of active addiction–threw both my husband and me into a state of perpetual PTSD. It also evoked memories of my own addiction to alcohol, including during Mal’s infancy (I relapsed when her pediatrician advised me to drink beer because my milk production insufficient and she was losing weight. I’m an addict–who was I to argue?). Additionally, she and I have both been treated for depression since childhood (I was on Valium when I was 12, for God’s sake–and Mallory’s depression manifested much earlier), and my mother suffered from horrible depression, most likely untreated bipolar disorder, throughout my childhood. So all of those factors congealed during this period–the memories, the fears, the regrets, the anger, the sorrow. The only way I could manage was to write my way through.

CD: Writing the poems must have been an extraordinary experience. Your poems about saving Mallory’s life (“Eating Dinner, After You Died,” “The Waitings”) begin in despair and end in hope. You might have kept these poems to yourself but chose to offer them publically in a collection. How did the publication of this book affect you emotionally and how have the poems affected your family?

BFJ: Let’s start with my family, first and foremost my daughter since she is a central character in the collection’s story arc. By the time I was ready to submit Blinded Birds to publishers, Mallory was in relatively long-term recovery–in fact, she had gone to graduate school to become a certified addictions counselor. I would never have published the poems without her permission, and she readily gave it, realizing not only the personal importance of telling our story but also the potential of connecting with others and offering them hope as a result since the final poems in the collection celebrate our joint recovery. Sadly, my mother–the third central character in the book–never achieved relief from her depression before she died. She was of a generation that clung to the belief that depression is a character flaw, not a treatable medical condition–much as addiction is still shrouded in stigma today. My husband was behind the book 100%. The rest of the family, including many who never realized our ongoing struggles with mental illness, were initially shocked but ultimately supportive. We got a lot of, “I’m so sorry–I never knew,” which just shows how well we hid the truth for so long.

I can feel the healing they’ve received from knowing they’re not alone. It’s therapeutic for all of us–the giver and the receivers of hope.

How did the book’s publication affect me emotionally? I think both Mallory and I feel really empowered by having the truth out in the open for others to learn from and, perhaps, glean hope from. Every time I finish a reading, people from the audience approach me to share their stories, especially ones about their own children who suffered, or suffer, from addiction. I can feel the healing they’ve received from knowing they’re not alone. It’s therapeutic for all of us–the giver and the receivers of hope.

CD: Your poems seem to be “spot on” in examining the cultural and societal issues so many families struggle with today. It has been said that the personal is universal, and your very personal poems speak directly to these issues. Was that something you considered when writing, that your work might help others understand the genesis and effects of addiction?

BFJ: It’s only in studying how others react to the poems that I’ve developed a keener awareness of society’s misevaluation of addiction and addicts. However, while drafting the poems, I definitely took a “genetics as culprit” approach. The three of us recently had genetic testing done, which revealed that both Mallory and I have the A1 allele. In study after study, that mutation on the brain’s dopamine receptors has been very closely linked to early-onset depression, severe alcoholism, ADHD, intractable PTSD, and a heightened risk for addiction to opioids. There are two poems at the beginning of the book that highlight the fury I feel at being a victim of genetics: “Blinded Birds” and “To an Allele.” And I wish I could have shared those findings with my mother who no doubt blamed herself rather than her genetic inheritance for her lifelong depression. (Her father was severely alcoholic and despondent; two of her siblings committed suicide.)

CD: When you understood the genetic component of depression and addiction did you feel relieved somehow of guilt or blame? I very much admire your poem “Triple Helix” that helps you “pry apart the DNA / that twists our fates together . . . .”

BFJ: Vindicated, perhaps, but not guiltless. There’s another poem in the book titled “Every Bad Thing That Ever Happened to Me Happened When I Was Drunk,” and that’s pretty much the truth of it. And not just the bad things that happened to me, but the bad things I imposed upon others, most notably my daughter. I relapsed twice during her childhood: once when she was an infant (the poem “Alky Mommy” speaks to that) and again when she was a teen–the two most impressionable periods in a child’s development. During those times, I was unavailable to Mallory on many levels. That’s why there’s so much regret and sorrow mixed with anger in discovering the genetic connection to addiction–my genes might have opened the door for me, but I’m the one who wrecked the room.

CD: Yet you did not leave the room in shambles. The last several poems in Blinded Birds speak to healing and resolution. In the book’s last poem, “Hovenweep,” you write “And then you, a damaged daughter, saved me. / And then I, a mother damned, saved you.” Do you have a favorite poem among those that bring the book to a close with hope?

BFJ: Yes! My favorite is “Return,” the second-to-last poem in the collection. I still connect to it, feel its power, whenever I read it. In it, I metaphorically compare recovery to a tree reawakening after a long winter, a long night. Isn’t that exactly what it feels like, the first time you wake up and don’t ache for a drink or a fix? You feel alive again. It’s remarkable. Like being reborn.

CD: You often give well attended readings. Is it difficult for you to share such emotional and revealing poems?

BFJ: Not at all. As I’ve mentioned, I can feel the healing that’s happening in the room–both for me and for those in attendance. Sure, there are some who can’t scurry away quickly enough after the reading (!), but I tell myself that they’re the ones who most needed to hear the poems.

CD: Yes, sometimes we experience something–a poem that cuts too close perhaps–and it’s often only later that we realize how we’ve been touched, been changed. Has writing Blinded Birds changed you or your family in any way?

BFJ: Personally, I’ve gained confidence on many levels since the book’s publication–as a poet, as a public speaker, as a truth-teller and giver of hope. I’m unafraid–unlike all those years I felt hidden and hurt by the truth. I think everyone in the family feels pretty much the same.

CD: Once in a lecture years ago at NYU the poet Yehuda Amichai said that in war, poems can’t save us. Do you think poetry can save us? Can it bring about changes in our society?

BFJ: It certainly has saved me on more than one occasion. So on a personal level, absolutely: poetry saves. But I see the powerful poems being written about the atrocities occurring in so many places today, and while those poems have impacted my sense of urgency and compassion, I don’t see that power playing out on a political level. I think the effect of art–whether poetry, song, or visual art–is limited to moving a pre-disposed audience. Sadly, they “preach to the choir”–albeit powerful and affective preaching.

CD: And now that Blinded Birds has found wide readership, tell me about your latest book. You’ve written again about your family, but this time about a special and specific person.

BFJ: Yes–FLOWN (Porkbelly Press, 2024) is an elegy-in-verse for my late sister, who died of metastatic breast cancer in July of 2022. It’s a chapbook of very short poems, written during the final months of Harriet’s illness and the days and weeks just after her passing. It’s raw, very raw. I still relive the anguish of those days when I read the poems.

CD: how was writing this book different from—or similar to—writing Blinded Birds?

BFJ: In terms of differences, the biggest one was that FLOWN was written while the events were transpiring, rather than in retrospect. It was a period of deep recollection and reflection, sussing–intuiting really–the metaphoric connections between Harriet’s illness (which we knew from the first diagnosis was terminal) and events from our childhood. There were four years between us, so I learned a great deal from her when we were young, just as she taught me so much about life and about the process of dying with her illness and eventual passing.

Both books are rich in symbolism, which I guess was the greatest similarity in writing them. The title and title poem of Blinded Birds reference the old Flemish tradition of vinkensport, in which chaffinches being trained to compete in contests that require them to repeat their distinctive song the most times per hour were once blinded with hot needles to minimize distraction during competition. Cruel, right? I used that analogy to illustrate the cruelty of genetics in predetermining our propensity for addiction–and, yes, of any god who would create genetic mutations in the first place and use them for his “sport.” That metaphor echoes through the poems, just as the symbols of holes (including graves) and birds make repeated appearances throughout FLOWN. 

CD: And one question about your poetic process. Do you have any special inspirations or habits that help you create? Sharon Olds once said that she finds inspiration in walking across water. Some poets have elaborate pre-writing rituals, or must have silence, or can only write at a table at Starbucks.

BFJ: For me, it’s hard to find a place quiet enough to write, to achieve that feeling of being completely removed from the world. So I usually draft my poems wearing headphones and listening to either Philip Glass or to theta wave-inducing music online. Both are very hypnotic for me and allow me to reach my Zen place.

CD: As one of your fans, I’m grateful for the words and images that arise from your Zen place! Finally, is there a message or a realization that you hope readers will take away after reading Blinded Birds?

BFJ: First, addiction and depression are genetic “gifts” that no one asks to receive. They are treatable conditions, deserving of society’s and the medical community’s non-judgmental compassion and support, not its dismissal and neglect. Second, there is always, always hope. The path to recovery is fraught with physical and mental anguish, blame-placing, and failure, but keep going. Keep going. Keep going. And help others on their path, too.

B. Fulton Jennes is Poet Laureate Emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she also served for many years as poet-in-residence at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her poems have appeared in CALYX, Comstock Review, Extreme Sonnets II, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. Jennes’ poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the 2022 Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. In 2021, her poem “From the Room of an Unknown Girl” was awarded the Leslie McGrath Prize. Jennes’ first collection of poems, Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press), received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. Another chapbook, FLOWN—an elegy for her late sister—will be published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. She lives in Ridgefield with husband Chuck.

Rearranged by Kathleen Watt

Guy Glass — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 18:34:33 +0000

An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

Rearranged by Kathleen Watt is subtitled “An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Tranposed.” At the outset of the book, the author feels on top of the world. She can hardly believe she has the opportunity, as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Extra Chorus, to share the stage with some of her biggest idols. She has a wonderful partner and a warm and close family.

Then, one day, Watt discovers a bump in her mouth. She is found to have a rare and aggressive oral cancer that is “breathtakingly tailored to obliterate my profession and my raison d’être, never mind my face” (p. 51). She undergoes multiple reconstructive surgeries, some of which are unsuccessful or become infected. While she is initially reassured she will be able to sing again in a few months, that goal proves unrealistic. Watt’s partner is emotionally supportive for years, but even for her there is a limit. When the author is unable to pull her own weight financially and develops an addiction to alcohol, the relationship unravels.

The greater part of Rearranged chronicles Watt’s medical ordeals. Previously an active and productive person, she is now at the whim of her doctors’ schedules. She gives up all hope of performing again. As anyone who has experienced an illness or the illness of a loved one knows, navigating the health care system can easily become a full-time job.

The book ends optimistically as Watt’s condition stabilizes. She realizes she is lucky to be alive and accepts her “rearranged” looks. She reconciles herself to a future where she will “henceforth sing mostly for myself “(p. 304), and redefines herself as a writer specializing in the performing arts.

Rearranged is a book which teaches valuable lessons. Watt endures extreme hardship, has her dreams shattered, and acquires wisdom that will benefit providers and patients.

As anyone who has experienced an illness or the illness of a loved one knows, navigating the health care system can easily become a full-time job.

One lesson learned is that unempathic caregivers may compound a patient’s suffering. “A multi-gigging freelancer with catastrophic coverage at best” (p. 31), the author has a miscommunication with an endodontist and is threatened with a lawsuit for presumed nonpayment. And when she dares to question another doctor, he snaps at her: “Ha, ha! I’m not going to teach you surgery” (p. 57). Fortunately, other providers have a manner that is more conducive to healing: “Because he [the doctor] conveyed neither arrogance nor impatience, his confident command allowed me to trust him easily. And at that moment, nothing mattered more to my successful outcome” (p. 55), and “Alone among my doctors, he had thought to lament my loss. A helium cloud filled me at this simple expression of kindness. Nothing at that moment could have been more restorative” (p.108).

One can understand how traumatic it must be to have one’s facial features distorted as the result of illness. For a singer it can be career-ending, not only because she needs to show her face to the public but because the vocal cavity may be damaged. But, beyond this, because “the face is the single most important organ of human communication” (p.105), the author feels she has lost her identity: “I felt as bereft of myself as I was of my voice…I missed seeing my reflection in the faces of others. I began to lose track of my own subtexts, and myself” (p.237)

The author relates a vivid and frightening memory of experiencing post-operative delirium (sometimes called ICU psychosis). When she comes out of surgery and suddenly realizes she cannot talk because she has had a tracheotomy, she pounds on the wall. She wishes she had had “healthy people to paste accurate information alongside my cockeyed perception, so I could avoid drawing mistaken conclusions from my misperceptions” (p.146). Instead, she overhears attendants saying “Boy, she’s really out of it” (p. 149) and referring to her as “a royal bitch” (p.140). At no time does anyone think to help “confirm her sanity, quell her fears” (p. 150). Hopefully, health care professionals will read this and think about it the next time they see a patient right out of the OR.

In closing, it bears mentioning that at one point Kathleen Watt consults with surgeon Iain Hutchison in London. Hutchison is the initiator and sponsor of the Saving Faces Art Project, a series of paintings by artist Mark Gilbert which “portray the faces of patients before, after and in some cases actually during their surgery for injury, deformity or cancer” and whose purpose is to “communicate the strength of spirit which can enable people with facial disfigurements and trauma to lead full and happy lives.” (from https://savingfaces.co.uk/our-mission/art-project/ ) Likewise, the author of Rearranged inspires the reader by her strength of spirit in the face of inconceivable adversity.

REARRANGED
An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer And Life Transposed
Heliotrope Books, New York, 2023
384 pages

Kathleen Watt’s website: kathleenwatt.com

Getting Dopesick: Four Angles on the Opioid Crisis

Russell Teagarden — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 01:04:00 +0000

Podcast from The Clinic & The Person

We feature four different angles addressing the opioid crisis, mostly as the opioid product OxyContin is involved and as the Appalachian region is affected. Our objective is to show how realms outside Biomedicine—the Humanities, in this case—can provide a range of perspectives suited to preferences, interests, and needs for understanding a particular issue. The four angles we feature are: nonfiction investigative journalism; nonfiction dramatization; narrative nonfiction; and literary fiction. We consider different approaches to selecting the best choice or the best order among available options.

Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Beth Macy (Nov 2, 2022)

Source Citations:
Macy B. Dopesick. New York; Little, Brown, and Company, 2018
Strong D. Dopesick. John Goldwyn Productions, 2021 (streamed on Hulu)
Keefe PR. Empire of Pain. New York; Doubleday, 2021.
Kingsolver B. Demon Copperhead; Harper, 2022. (Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Links:
Russell Teagardens According to the Arts blog pieces mentioned in the podcast:
Dopesick (nonfiction book – investigative)
Dopesick (TV miniseries)
Empire of Pain (narrative nonfiction)
Demon Copperhead (novel)

Russell Teagarden’s article in The Pharos comparing Dopesick (the book and the TV miniseries) with Demon Copperhead

Recommendations:
De Quincey T. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. New York; Penguin Classics, 2003. (See Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on this book here.)
Daudet A. In the Land of Pain. (Translator Julian Barnes) New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. (See Russell Teagarden’s blog piece on this book here.)

The Clinic & The Person is a podcast developed by our editor Russell Teagarden 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.

Feature photo by ANTIPOLYGON