Apollo On Call

In this episode of Apollo on Call, Dave is joined by Luki Danukarjanto to discuss Atul Gawande’s book on end-of-life care, as well as relate it to their aging parents and their own experience getting older. They also examine the medical perspective to the situation is well-being or survival the goal of end-of-life care?

Check out Dave’s Substack for more! https://davidmhsu.substack.com/

Web image by Age Cymru 

Additional Episodes

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

03.14.25 3069

Two book lovers dive into The Emperor of All Maladies, exploring its impact on medicine…

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

03.30.26 412

A thoughtful conversation on aging, mortality, and balancing quality of life with survival in care…

The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese

06.10.25 2760

A special podcast episode blending sports and medicine, exploring The Tennis Partner and the complexities…

How Real is the Pitt? 

05.05.25 1788

Dr. Stuart Harman joins Apollo On Call to explore The PITT—a gripping medical drama through…

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

04.17.25 1599

A poignant documentary exploring how a young man with muscular dystrophy found profound connection and…

As The Ghost Road begins, Prior has been cured of shell shock and is preparing to return to the front in France. Rivers takes care of his patients and his invalid sister, amid memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia (Eddystone Island). He befriended Nijiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island’s sacred Place of the Skulls.

Rivers entertains very un-British thoughts about the morality of these headhunting people, and about the power of symbolic healing. As these thoughts intrude upon his consciousness, Rivers is himself in the process of curing by suggestion a soldier with hysterical paralysis. Meanwhile, Billy Prior returns to the front. It is the autumn of 1918 and the last inhuman spasms of the war are in progress. In a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice, Billy and his friend Wilfred Owen are killed.

To me The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, is the most gripping and fastest paced of Pat Barker’s trilogy. The first two novels are Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). As W. H. R. Rivers reflects on the culture of death on Eddystone Island, World War I, a culmination of the culture of death in Europe, grinds to a close, taking with it the poet Wilfred Owen. Of course, the characters in The Ghost Road are unaware of the new heights (or depths) that the culture of death will attain later in the 20th Century.

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker
Dutton, 1995
New York, 256 pages

Web image by  Claudio Carrozzo 

Mental Cases by Wilfred Owen

Carol Donley Aug 11, 2025

Owen’s stark poem portrays shell-shocked soldiers haunted by war, exposing both their torment and society’s complicity in their suffering.

We consider “illness as loss” through three different scenarios from Lionel Shriver’s novel, So Much For That. The three scenarios are: sociopsychological, financial, and clinical. We focus on how the literary novel form isolates these scenarios and offers fully reflective accounts of how people can be affected by them. We also note how literary fiction can be the only or best medium for subjects often too sensitive for public forums such as whether money can be an object in health care decisions. We spend some time distinguishing illness as what people experience subjectively from a particular health problem, and disease as the pathophysiological basis for a particular health problem. Dan talks about how illness as loss is a useful concept for discerning the help people may need, and how using the word “loss” can be a valuable tool for helping them.

Citation:
Shriver L. So Much For That. New York; HarperCollins, 2010.

Links:
Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces mentioned in the podcast:
Review of So Much For That

A comparison of biomedical and literary descriptions of familial dysautonomia
Distinguishing disease, illness, and sickness
Elements of illness
Illness as loss

Recommendations:
Rick Beato interview with Keith Jarret, recommended by inhouse musical director and cultural editor, Benedict Teagarden
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby (memoir and movie)
On His Blindness, John Milton, poem, recommended by inhouse rhetorician and literary editor, Alexis Teagarden

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 photoo by Andrik Langfield