Commonly argued among readers is whether fiction or nonfiction brings the most value to understanding any particular issue. These arguments sometimes end with one interlocutor saying, “I only read nonfiction,” and the other saying, “I only read fiction.” Choosing either one alone, however, can deprive readers of valuable knowledge and perspectives that only both together can provide. Such is the case when reading Laura Spinny’s history, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, and Kathryn Anne Porter’s “short novel”—as she insisted it be called—Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Spinny researches the effects the pandemic had on exposed populations and Porter conjures the effects it had on infected individuals.

The titles for both Spiney’s book and Porter’s story draw from the the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation (6:8) in the New Testament, and one of the horsemen in particular.

And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.

Both books speak of death, not as the natural course of human life, but resulting from an apocalypse of a biblical scale, of a vengeful god, and of a plague in form. Spinney applies the apocalypse metaphor to peoples and Porter to persons.  

Spinny’s account focuses on how the 1918 flu pandemic altered history.

The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa to Apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. (p. 8)

She also describes how national public health and global health organizations reorganized and generated momentum towards today’s more sophisticated agencies. She suggests further that the flu pandemic affected literature and art as well, and speculates about why it’s not remembered in any way like the two world wars of the same century. The bulk of the book, though, describes what happened to populations, and how this pandemic could be considered an apocalypse.

The number of dead could have been as high as 100 million—a number so big and so round that it seems to glide past any notion of human suffering without even snagging on it. It’s not possible to imagine the mystery contained within that train of zeroes. All we can do is compare it to other trains of zeroes—notably, the death tolls of the First and Second World Wars—and by reducing the problem to one of maths, conclude that it might have been the greatest demographic disaster of the twentieth century, possibly of any century.(p. 171)

This is where Porter’s literary contribution to capturing “any notion of human suffering” comes in—the personal apocalypse. Based to a degree on her own experience surviving a case of the 1918 flu, her short novel follows Miranda, a reporter for a local newspaper in Denver, Colorado, during a time when she is early in a courtship with Adam, a soldier on leave from camp but who is soon to be shipped overseas to the battlegrounds of WWI. Together they start to see the flu engulf the area.

“I wonder,” said Miranda. “How did you manage to get an extension of leave?”
“They just gave it,” said Adam, for no reason. The men are dying like flies out   there, anyway. This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked hat.”
“It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?” (p. 281)

Then, the flu engulfs Miranda, and Porter helps us imagine what a personal apocalypse could be like when an individual succumbs to it. She imagines the Pale Rider pulling her away from her physical moorings on Earth.

I must give up, I can’t hold out any longer. There was only that pain, only that room, and only Adam. There were no longer any multiple planes of living, no tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her upright between them. There was only this one moment and it was a dream of time, and Adam’s face, very near hers, eyes still and intent, was a shadow, and there was to be nothing more… (p. 304)

Eventually the Pale Rider tries to pull her away from even any vestige of her corporeal being itself, and were it for a mere particle of life force would have done just that.

Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planes beyond the one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay. (p. 311)

Many published histories of the 1918 flu pandemic concentrate on the devastation visited upon nations and populations. Most stop at the individual, because historians rely on tangible and verifiable facts, but literary fiction writers can turn personal narratives into stories that render pictures of what individuals could experience with particular illnesses. These two books referencing Pale Horse, Pale Rider in their titles—one a nonfiction history and the other a literary fiction—work well in combination to capture the experiences and consequences of this flu on both populations and individuals. Further, these two books show why fiction and nonfiction accounts of particular subjects should not be considered a choice, but rather as opportunities to get fuller accounts of diseases on populations and individuals.

Revelation 6:8, English Standard Version (ESV). © 2001 by Crossway; text edition: 2025.
‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ In The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Harvest, 1979.
Spinney L. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. New York; Public Affairs, 2017)
Web image generated by Gemini AI

Literature mirrors the general culture. There has been a recent explosion of books in which AI is the central plot device moving the narrative forward to endings that range from a utopian fulfillment of human destiny to the catastrophic collapse of civilization and the annihilation of humankind. But AI infiltrated the literary space several decades ago. Philip Dick imagined a world in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where cyborgs were being hunted down because of fear that they might take over the world. In 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, a robot named Hal murders nearly all the crew of a spaceship on a planetary mission because of a programming error. 

Speak by Louisa Hall is more recent addition to the AI library. But it was published several years before large language models became a routine tool to plan a vacation or write a letter of recommendation. Is it still worth reading in 2025? 

The novel is a composite narrative centered around five interwoven stories spanning the time period from 1663 to 2040. In the first narrative, a young Puritan girl who finds herself in an unwanted marriage, records her thoughts in a diary that she is writing on a treacherous ocean voyage to America. Fast forward to the 20^th century and we meet Alan Turing who is writing letters to the mother of young man to whom he was emotionally attached and who died prematurely. He is troubled by his inability at times to communicate with people. A decade later we meet Karl and Ruth Dettman, a couple whose families escaped Nazi Germany but under vastly different circumstances. The husband, Karl, is a computer scientist who has developed a program named MARY to enable computers to interact with humans. Ruth, his wife, is a historian who has built a career centered on the publication of old diaries like the one written by the young woman traveling to America. She is trying to convince Karl to expand the memory of his computer program and enrich it with more human material, but Karl stubbornly refuses because he is concerned about the power of his program to overwhelm its users if its database is expanded. Finally, we jump ahead to 2040, and we read the transcripts of the trial of Stephen Chinn, a man who is being prosecuted for the production of robots that are too life-like. Chinn is being accused of causing physical and psychological harm to the people who have used his robots and of weakening normal relationships between people. A young adolescent named Gaby, who was given a doll powered by a version of MARY, is one of his alleged victims. His own personal recollections are folded into the trial proceedings, as he tries to describe his intentions, justify his actions, and make amends for where they may have gone awry. 

Taking stock of our world today, there is clear evidence that AI can improve the day-to-day lot of people, make life more convenient and efficient, and promote better health outcomes. However, much of the current angst that permeates discussions of AI is focused on the potential economic and sociopolitical consequences. There is fear that systematic adoption of AI will lead to widespread loss of jobs and financial distress for people left behind. The generation of false data and uncontrolled dissemination of unfiltered information may, it is feared, foster social unrest and destabilize democratic institutions.  

All of these predictions, for good or for bad, center on the word “intelligence.” If it is defined as the creative use of information towards a specific goal– my definition, to be sure — then it exists along a gradient and there is not an opposing term. In that case, the mixed picture about the future of AI seems accurate. Humans can process information to both noble and destructive ends. If machines are provided information by humans, then it is likely that there will be worthy and flawed outcomes. It is not a reflection of the logical structures or neural networks that are built into us as humans or artificially placed into machines. It simply is the nature of intelligence. Information is agnostic and it can be processed in a limitless number of ways; there is no guarantee of what will happen when it is processed. 

On the other hand, if we center our predictions on the word “artificial,” there is an opposing term, namely “genuine.” Speak looks beyond AI as intelligence and forces us to think about its impact on interpersonal communication and interactions. The design of the robots that are being created in fiction and in our world of 2025 is steadily improving. The voices become more lifelike, the reactions more emotionally appropriate, the reactions more convincing. They display keen intelligence and manifest seeming empathy with their handlers. Like the artificial friend in Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishigura, the robots may even appear to have more feelings and awareness of the ever-changing psychological state of their owners than family members and friends. But it will always remain artificial. Speak forces us to ponder whether interactions between human beings have an element that cannot be programmed, that is not simply manipulation of information. It is that piece that accounts for the genuine nature of relationships between people and it is that component that is vital for human growth and maturation. The interconnected stories in Speak raise the concern that reliance on AI, in whatever embodied form it takes, to provide support and companionship may inevitably fail and leave damaged humans in its mechanical wake. The intelligence of AI may not be sufficient for humans to thrive. It remains difficult to put into words exactly what to call this additional component of human interaction. Thankfully, there is literature, and creative novels like Speak, to help us grapple with what it might be and to help us steer a course where AI is developed thoughtfully with full awareness of its limitations and potential for good and harm. 

SPEAK  
Louisa Hall 
EccoPress, New York 2016, 356 pp 
Web image by Medhum.org

Kairos is the claustrophobic story of an affair between a 19-year-old woman and a married man more than 30 years her senior. Nothing unique in that situation. But this clandestine relationship unfolds against the backdrop of the last years of the German Democratic Republic before the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall. This too is familiar territory — from novels like John LeCarre’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent to popular movies like The Lives of Others. What makes Kairos different from anything that I have read about this period is the microscopic view it provides of the dysfunctional relationship between Katharina and Hans and the larger vision of reality that emerges. 

Their initial meeting is a completely chance encounter on a bus in Berlin as they shove to board it and escape the rain. They spy each other immediately and within a few pages are sleeping together. Hans is a married broadcast journalist who seems to have found a secure niche for himself despite state control of the press, while Katharine is a student in theater arts. Literary May-December romances are not uncommon, but the rushed and secretive meetings between the two lovers quickly move into less comfortable terrain. Katharine becomes increasingly insecure and less assertive in her interactions with Hans. Violent sadomasochistic behavior intrudes into their space, and Hans becomes more domineering and demanding. This is not a fuzzy tale of two star-crossed lovers who pine longingly for one another; this is obsessive territory. Over time, distrust and suspicion and mutual cruelty invade the lovers’ trysts. When Katharine leaves Berlin for a period of academic study in Frankfurt, it triggers exaggerated accusations of betrayal by Hans. He blames Katharine for being unreliable and not fully committed to their relationship and calls into question her loyalty to him. There is lots of sex and coded signals and furtive meetings to avoid detection by Hans’ wife and son. But the mood becomes chillier and more tense with each turning page. Eventually, the political uprising across Germany and Eastern Europe ruptures the novel’s narrow field of vision and alters the contour of their illicit relationship.  

The novel is bracketed by two efforts at historical reconstruction, accomplished by mining written records from the period. This highlights the power of literary narratives to frame our lives, something that Kairos accomplishes so successfully. The plot is spare but Jenny Erpenbeck has created a novel that is very thick with the lives of the two characters, and it is that richness of texture and intimacy, disturbing as it might be, which causes the book to reverberate in your memory long after you put it down. 

Why is that? What Kairos accomplishes better than other books I have read in recent memory is its ability to bring to life the impact of our social and political environment on our inner lives. The tautness of Erpenbeck’s writing, the novel’s ominous and suspicious atmosphere, are a direct reflection of what it might have been like to live in East Germany after the Iron Curtain descended and the Berlin Wall was erected. The East German domestic spy service, the notorious Stasi, infiltrated everyday life. Anyone could be an informer and everyone could be informed on. Petty offenses against the Communist party, minor disagreements between colleagues about policy, and trivial comments among friends about current affairs could quickly escalate into charges of treason, of being an enemy of the state. No one knew exactly what could provoke a summons to a closed room interrogation and a prison sentence. 

 It is in this stultifying environment that Katharine and Hans’s relationship takes shape and it is against this sweeping historical background that we confront and must try to understand their thoughts and actions. Katharine is young but seems deadened by life on the dreary East German side of the Berlin Wall with its brutalist architecture and its color spectrum ranging from shades of gray to shades of gray. For her, even a destructive relationship with an older man, a spiteful and hurtful one at that, may have provided a glimmer of hope for a “real” life. Hans has survived under the Communist regime and achieved a modicum of fame and fortune. But we can only speculate on the cost. Erpenbeck makes it clear that the price was high. The humanity of both main characters has been stunted by their reaction to living in a police state and by internalizing the distrustful depersonalizing actions of the government’s internal espionage apparatus. I suggest that Erpenbeck’s accomplishment is to show how the political environment can influence personal patterns of behavior. 

How would we have held up if forced to live under such conditions? Would one have had the courage to speak truth to power or would one have hunkered down, kept a low profile, and avoided confrontation with the state? What would we have resorted to in order to protect ourselves and our job, family, and friends? Could we have maintained our humanity and dignity? Katharine and Hans lived with these unbearable dilemmas every day and their personalities were gradually warped under the relentless pressure.  

It is easy to devalue the lives of others living in the former East Germany or Soviet Union, or current China or Iran, where men and women are forced to remain in countries that interfere with the freedom to think and express oneself and where every thought and action is under surveillance. But it would be a mistake. We should not lose sight of external factors in this country that threaten our individuality and our humanity. Whether it is political uniformity and social tribalism or blind use of the tools of artificial intelligence, we too must recognize and address the social forces that could impact on how we interact with the world and behave to one another. Like the Stasi in East Germany, these forces have the real potential to diminish our stature as moral agents.  

Neither main character in Kairos is easy to identify with and it is hard to muster sympathy for the plight of either one. But our distaste for Katharine and Hans is tempered by the knowledge that their souls have been distorted, damaged almost beyond repair, by a state that has flattened the complexity of human individuality into a file of incriminating notes based on informer reports. I suspect it may be especially hard for a woman to read this book and suffer along with Katharine as she is manipulated and physically and psychologically abused by Hans. But one cannot escape the reality that Hans too is a victim. Quality literature like Kairos does not aim to rationalize human behavior. What it can do is contextualize fictional characters and in doing so make us understand what some of our fellow human beings are going through a little bit better and with a little more sensitivity. 

Winner: International Booker Prize 2024

A Q&A with Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann

KAIROS 
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck 
Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; First Paperback Edition (May 14, 2024) 
Hardback: 2021, Penguin Verlag 
Paperback: 304 pages 
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811238539 

Photo by Lucy Bruell

Paul Harding uses this disquieting episode as the basis for his latest novel, The Other Eden. Harding is the author of Tinkers, his debut novel which was published in 2009 by Bellevue Literary Press. That book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a unique achievement for a book that had been published well outside of the mainstream. His setting is called Apple Island, and the founders are Benjamin Honey, a freed slave, and his Irish wife Patience Raferty who arrive on the island in 1792. They survive a monstrous storm and flood in 1815 and together with a handful of families build a community that over the next 100 years is able to endure and thrive in the face of the harsh elements that confront them.

The descendants of the Honeys are the most prominent characters in Harding’s narrative. The current matriarch, Esther, spends most of her time brooding in a rocking chair, keeping watch over her family, and vigilantly guarding a secret about her son, Eha. Eha is a carpenter, who partners with another resident on the island to build all of the homes for the residents; this partner is an older man who lives alone sheltered inside a hollowed-out tree and who has carved an intricate circular mural that coils upward along the trunk of his home.  Ethan, Eha’s 15-year old son, is a precociously talented artist who is alert to nature and his surroundings and constantly putting images to paper. His two younger sisters are always on the go and playing with the children of three other families.

The outside world intervenes in this quiet secluded world when a team of officials from the neighboring town of Foxden on the coast comes to Apple Island with a mission — to investigate the health and well-being of the inhabitants. They are primed by an entrenched belief that there are certain people in society who are innately better and the consequent dangers of mixing races and inbreeding over several generations. With this in mind, the town representatives conclude that it is in the best interest of all concerned to condemn the Apple Island village and disperse its inhabitants. This is the only solution that they believe will prevent future generations from being adversely affected by the downward spiral of human intellectual and moral capacity and that will avoid the spread of this social contagion beyond the confines of the island. Interwoven with this depressing storyline, there is an effort by a local minister to rescue Ethan from Apple Island because he is very fair-skinned. He may be able to pass as White and his artistic talent may enable him to overcome his “flawed” racial beginnings. Needless to say, the path to a tragic ending is patiently laid out by the author. But Harding’s genius is to make us appreciate the deep humanity and abiding love that the inhabitants of Apple Island sustain even though they cannot escape the colony’s ultimate demise.

A plot summary cannot do justice to the beauty and power of Harding’s prose. His principal characters are simple people living  a subsistence existence. But they are embedded in a lushly evoked environment, and they are attuned to the rhythms of nature and the cycles of daily human life. The emotions are deeply felt, and the action rings true; the inhabitants of the island are not cardboard heroes or angels. There is a threat of violence lurking just below the surface that can emerge with shattering force when triggered by unexpected events.

Ethan’s story is presented as a complex mixture of personalities and motivations. The minister who comes to Apple Island to tutor the children and who devises the plan to rescue Ethan from life on the island recognizes the remarkable native intelligence of his school-age pupils, one who is literate in Latin, another who has mastered geometry. But he painfully admits in his private journal to deep feelings of revulsion when he is surrounded by the black and mixed race children in school. When Ethan is relocated to the home of a wealthy family on the mainland to continue his art education, he becomes more than friends  with one of the servant girls, Bridget. There is a familiar element to their story, but the last stage is surprising and moving in its depiction of devotion and steadfastness in the face of love and separation. Ethan’s fate is mysterious, but his drawings live on in museum exhibitions.

The underlying motivations of the mainlanders who come to survey the living conditions of the people on Apple Island are clothed in their seemingly noble aspiration of improving the lot of humanity.  They use the language of social Darwinism to defend their eugenics agenda, and this is no simple literary plotline. The eugenics movement in the United States was widespread and widely accepted; the nation became obsessed with the concept of “fitter families” and the dangers of reproduction of the unfit, and over 60,000 “feeble minded” individuals were involuntarily sterilized in early twentieth century America. The horrible consequences of flawed science and mistaken beliefs about biology and intrinsic human worth are made abundantly clear. But Harding’s writing rises above formulaic condemnation or pedantic instruction to the reader. He makes you live the experience and the suffering of the islanders whose humanity is so grossly ignored by the team of experts sent to learn about them and then deal with them.

Many reviewers of The Other Eden have commented on the mythic nature of the book. I think they sell Harding short. I think his accomplishment is far greater. His writing is almost Biblical in nature,  in the sense that Marilynne Robinson describes biblical writing in her recent book Understanding Genesis (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2024). In that work, Robinson marvels at how all of the events that unfold in Genesis occur under divine guidance and plans, yet  the men and women maintain their independence to act and influence their fate. God and  humankind are in a covenantal relationship. Each has the capacity to surprise, to rise above their circumstances, defy expectations and even act out of love and forbearance when circumstances might dictate revenge and retribution. Similarly, Harding’s literary world is infused with the powerful belief in human agency and decency, concepts in direct counterpoint to the biologic determinism to which the mainlanders subscribe

The Other Eden evokes many Biblical narratives and themes. Apple Island grows out of a flood and the inhabitants are dispersed after the decision is made to end the colony. There is demonic evil and the threat of servitude, with the image of an enslaving Pharaoh lurking over the heads of the investigators from Foxden. There is branding at birth, deception of elders, scheming to save a favored child, and banishment of a disgraced woman. Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Pharoah, and Ruth are hovering over the residents of Apple Island. Harding uses all of these archetypal tropes and personalities. But like all good Biblical narratives, the images serve to construct a human world that speaks to all of us. The Other Eden is more than a foundation myth. It is a chronicle of living.

THIS OTHER EDEN
Paul Harding
W.W. Norton and Co.
2023
221 pp (paperback)

Web Photo by Seth Dewey

That is just the start of it. 

The plot has numerous twists and turns. The perspective and writing style shift from character to character with each passing chapter.  There is movement backward and forward in time. The backdrop changes with the suddenness of the movement of scenery between acts in a play. The lives of the characters branch out in many directions, venturing into uncharted territory and intersecting unexpectedly at key moments. The prose and the imagery are textured to match each character. However, all the elements cohere, creating the experience of reading in a lived world. 

The trajectory of each parent evolves darkly over time. Dickie is blackballed because of an identity he has kept secret all his life. Imelda becomes increasingly desperate, and her actions become more and more unhinged. The two children can only turn to one another to fill the gap left by their wayward parents. As disaster draws closer and closer to Dickie, he partners with a  laconic neighbor to build an underground bunker in the woods to survive the coming Armageddon. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

This 643- page book is extraordinary.  When I started it on the strong recommendation of my dependable oldest daughter, I was unsure if I would have the patience to persevere to the end. But this is an all-encompassing novel. Paul Murray has created a world, hauls you into it, and hurtles you forward into the turbulent stream of the characters’ lives. The artistry is astonishing. The setting, the interior monologues, the conversations, the actions are aptly described. 

The story has an air of inevitability to it, which brings me to an aspect of this book that made it truly special: do things happen in the world at random or is everything linked in a deterministic web of causation? The classic expression of the determinist view is — if one single monarch butterfly flaps its black and orange wings in New York, then the subtle change in air flow in the Big Apple is passed along across the Atlantic, through Europe, across Asia in countless incremental steps and culminates in a monsoon in Bangladesh. The bee sting that furnishes the title for Murray’s novel is a seemingly innocuous event on the day of Imelda and Dickie’s wedding. But in the world of the book, it unleashes  a sequence of events for each member of the Barnes family that defines their destiny. It seems as if they are trapped in a dense web  and cannot escape the forces driving them forward to their ultimate doom. Yet, each character confronts moments of crisis, episodes of personal vulnerability and they make choices. They fail to answer the phone call, they opt to go to the party, they invite relatives to visit. Who or what is controlling their fate?

Philosophers have traditionally debated and continue to argue whether free will is a reflection of reality or whether it is a convenient delusion. We may never fully know or comprehend why things play out the way they do in each of our lives. It may always appear as if we are being moved around by relentless forces that are bigger than and invisible to each of us. At the same time, we feel that we have agency. That is the mystery of life. In a novel, there is an inscrutable controlling power, the author who is the puppeteer manipulating all the movements of his characters and the story. She can make events play out in whatever way she thinks best matches her vision of the paginated world. But good authors know that they must create human characters and not marionettes. They have to walk the philosophical tightrope between determinism and free will. Within a tightly constructed literary universe, authors must create a world in which the narrative captures the larger forces buffeting  the characters drawn on the page, be it climate change, immigration to a new county, or the outbreak of war. But there must be space for the characters to behave as recognizable people subject to the consequences of their own choices or those of others. When authors succeed, the readers of their books realize that have been offered a precious insight about what it means to be fully human. No one has done this better than Paul Murray in this monumental book.

THE BEE STING
Paul Murray
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux
New York, 2023 pp 643

Photo credit: Boris Smokrovic

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 

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.

Links
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)

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 image by Ksenia