At age nine, first misdiagnosed and finally identified as having facial bone cancer (Ewing’s sarcoma), Lucy underwent several surgeries and more than two years of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Pain and nausea, anxiety and fear of more pain and nausea were only part of the ordeal. The young Lucy became aware of what it is to be severely, chronically ill. Her sisters behaved differently toward her: they were polite. “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another, and they were only pausing.” Even her father felt uncomfortable at her hospital bedside, and Lucy was relieved that he came infrequently.

But being at home was worse: in the hospital the other patients and the staff expected little from her and she felt no guilt or shame; amidst her family, she blamed herself for the tension, arguments over money, and her mother’s depression, even though these elements had existed prior to her illness. Her hair fell out and she became dimly aware that people were staring at her face. Nevertheless, “I . . . was naturally adept at protecting myself from the hurt of their insults and felt a vague superiority . . . . “

Well enough to return to school, Lucy’s disfigured face drew taunts from classmates; she understood finally that she was perceived as ugly and that she would not be loved. Only on Halloween, when she could mask her face, did she feel free and joyful, unconcerned about her appearance, “normal.” Her moods now alternated between despair, determination, and escapism. She became convinced that only facial reconstruction and a restored appearance would make life bearable.

During years of reconstructive surgery Lucy evolved complex rationalizations to give meaning to her suffering. Two anchors had stabilized her existence throughout the misery: a passionate adolescent love of horses, and an adult love of poetry. Eventually outward appearance and inner life became harmonious. “The journey back to my face was a long one.”

Unfortunately, Lucy’s story does not end here. At age 39 she committed suicide. Soon after, her close friend, writer Ann Patchett, wrote a book about their friendship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, published in 2003 (HarperPerennial).

Lucy Grealy Interview in 1994 (20 Min.)

Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy
Houghton Mifflin 1994 Boston: 256 pages

1995 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction , Poetry: https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/lucy-grealy
Web image generated from the book cover by Medhum.

At age 18, Frida Kahlo suffered a catastrophic accident that had lifelong consequences. The school bus in which she was a passenger collided with a trolley. Her spinal column was broken in three places, as were her collarbone, two ribs, her right leg and foot. The treatment was to lie on her back for one month, enclosed in a plaster cast. In addition, Kahlo had polio as a child, and one leg was shorter and thinner than the other.

This stunning portrait demands the viewer’s attention. A woman, Frida Kahlo, looms in the foreground, central to the painting, facing the viewer fully frontal, a few tears spilling down her face. She is nude, except for a sheet that is wrapped around her foreshortened lower body, and the widely spaced straps of an upper-body corset. On the one hand, the figure is passive, gazing at us almost without expression, completely still, acceptant of the scattered nails and rigid column that penetrate her body. On the other hand, the beauty of her perfectly formed breasts and well-formed upper body, the eyes that engage the viewer, subtly convey the energy of the figure’s spirit and will. At this point in Kahlo’s life, the painful physical problems that had plagued her on and off for years were becoming unrelenting. Doctors prescribed a variety of orthopedic corsets to support her degenerating spine. The portrait seems to personify pain and simultaneously some level of tolerance for pain.

Many who view the painting are reminded of images of Christ on the cross. Kahlo was certainly long-suffering and represented the physical and emotional aspects of her condition in many of her works (for example, “Tree of Hope” and “Henry Ford Hospital“), but the energy and originality of her personality and artistic vision shine through. For interesting commentary on “The Broken Column,” see Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: Harper Perennial) 2002, pp. 180-183. Also useful is Gannit Ankori’s commentary in her book, Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 114-119). Ankori points out that the vertical fissure of Kahlo’s body and the fissures in the earth surrounding her evoke violation — consistent with Kahlo’s statement that a metal rod had entered her hip and penetrated her vagina.

Web image from Wiki Commons

Among the scores of essays Montaigne wrote, while occasionally serving in various government roles, are accounts and commentaries concerning many of his infirmities. Kidney stone attacks in particular plagued Montaigne, and so they became subject matter for several essays. His focus on “the stone,” as he called this condition, generally concerned the physical and mental suffering acute attacks caused him, his work at reconciling a life with intermittent attacks, and from these two features, the profit his attacks afforded him. (N.B. I have drawn Montaigne’s words from the Everyman’s Library collection of Montaigne’s essays.)

Attack of The Stone

Pain from acute kidney stone attacks always ranks amongst the worst humans suffer from diseases, injuries, or various conditions. Montaigne’s vivid and horrifying descriptions of his kidney stone attacks lend credibility to these rankings: “I am at grips with the worst of all maladies, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable.” (p. 698)

To others looking on during one of his attacks, Montaigne says: “They see you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, sometimes shed great tears from your eyes, discharge thick, black, and frightful urine…” (p. 1019) No observer could doubt the intensity of pain kidney stone attacks produce after reading Montaigne’s accounts; no current sufferer would contradict them. 

A Life Accommodated

The pain and agony kidney stones inflict are never forgotten. And, the fear of knowing they will strike again is ever present, with good reason; they often return time after time. Indeed, this threat is a form of suffering of its own. Montaigne was cognizant of this reality, and writes about how he learned to live with the inevitability of a next attack. 

In the eighteen months or thereabouts that I have been in this unpleasant state, I have already learned to adapt myself to it. I am already growing reconciled to this colicky life; I find in it food for consolation and hope. So bewitched are men by their wretched existence, that there is no condition so harsh that they will not accept it to keep alive. (p. 697).

His primary approach was adopting a mentality allowing him to maintain as much function as possible while under frequent sieges of the stone: “I have kept my mind, up to now, in such a state that, provided I can hold fast, I find myself in a considerably better condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fever illness but what they give themselves by the fault of their reasoning.” (p. 701) Montaigne advises these thousand others they would do well to adjust their reasoning because the problem “occupies in us only that much room as we give it.” (p. 47) As for how much room to give the stone, he says, “we have no cause for complaint about illnesses that divide the time fairly with health.” (p. 1020)

With his reconciliation of a life with the stone, Montaigne carries on as close to a normal life as possible and not being obsessed with his condition: “Do not expect me to go and amuse myself testing my pulse and my urine so as to take some bothersome precaution; I shall be in plenty of time when I feel the pain, without prolonging it by the pain of fear.” (p. 1023) 

Profitable Kidney Stones

“I have in [my] time become acquainted with the kidney stone through the liberality of the years. Familiarity and long acquaintance with them do not readily pass without some such fruit.” (p. 697) The fruit is the profits he gains with kidney stones. The profits derived mainly from lessening his fear of death, better appreciating the health he had, and getting on with his life more easily. As such he has profited from receiving benefits exceeding the costs he incurred through suffering. 

“I’m not dead yet.” Montaigne wrote that when the stone visited him, he felt he was “so far forward into death that it would have been madness to hope, or even to wish, to avoid it, in view of the cruel attacks that this condition brings.” (p. 771) He had come face to face with death on those occasions only to survive. What he gained from these encounters he eventually appreciated as a form of profit. 

I have at least this profit from the stone, that it will complete what I have still not been able to accomplish in myself and reconcile and familiarize me completely with death: for the more my illness oppresses and bothers me, the less will death be something for me to fear. (p. 698) 

“What a feeling.” The perception of good health is created mostly either by various metrics like physical fitness standards (e.g., weight, strength, endurance), medical diagnoses, and other empiric findings, or by contrasts to states of bad health. Montaigne claimed great profit because his kidney stones reminded him how good his health is generally when he’s not in the midst of an attack. 

But is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after the illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other’s presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely! (p. 1021)

Montaigne also perceived profit from the finite nature of kidney stone attacks. He points to the abrupt resolution of an attack followed by a quick return to good health in contrast to other diseases causing their victims continuous suffering: “My sickness has this privilege, that it carries itself clean off, whereas the other always leave some imprint and change for the worse that makes the body susceptible to a new disease.” (p. 1022)

“Brush off the clouds and cheer up.” To Montaigne, kidney stone attacks are gruesome and can make the sufferer wish to die. But, by their nature, and as a form of profit, they can make life better between attacks than it would be otherwise. Montaigne sees this profit in the certainty that any attack will end and lives can go on as planned, because the stone is “a disease in which we have little to guess about. We are freed from the worry into which other diseases cast us by the uncertainty of their causes and conditions and progress—an infinitely painful worry.” (p. 1023) This means for Montaigne, that the stone “almost plays its game by itself and lets me play mine. (p. 1022)

The idea that there can be profit or any form of benefit from having kidney stones is likely preposterous to modern day sufferers, especially when effective analgesics and surgical techniques for acute attacks and methods for preventing them are available. Many people, however, still struggle with chronic kidney stones making Montaigne’s observations and advice relevant yet. Drawing from a cultural analog, he might tell them to look for the profit kidney stones generate, and when found, they will see that gray skies are going to clear up, so put on a happy face. Alas, his admonition would likely be met with stony silence. 

Kidney stone image from the gallery at KidneyStoners.
Title image credit: Three Kidney Stones Highlighted in Red. Sanderlewis, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The nature of phantom limb pain has bedeviled amputees and bewildered physicians and surgeons for centuries; up to 87% of amputees experience it during their lifetime. Consistently effective treatments remain elusive. Biomedical texts on the subject are at once complex and speculative. Olga Tokarczuk, in her 2018 novel, Flights, imagines what phantom limb pain could be like for someone, and the desperate search for relief it can produce. 

Flights centers mostly on the narrator’s travels among different places and across different times. It comprises mostly packets of individual story vignettes and fragments; some short, some long; some fictional; some real, some both. And though many different stories are told with many different characters about many different subjects, something about travel connects them all.  

Certain preoccupations manifest themselves in various parts of the book. One in particular concerns the technical aspects of preserving human body parts, which comes into play in a story fragment involving phantom limb pain. The main character is Philip Verheyen, who is a real historical figure known as a renowned Flemish surgeon and anatomist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and as the author of Corporis humani anatomiae (1710).  

As Tokarczuk tells the story, Verheyen was twenty-eight-years old in 1676 during his second year of university in Leiden when he scraped his left calf on an exposed nail of the stairway leading to his rented lodgings. His pants were torn and his skin broken. Though the injury seemed minor at first, it evolved into a raging infection that later required below-the-knee amputation.  

With the care of his landlady, Verheyen recovered after which he was seen “tapping his peg over the uneven paving stones of Leiden,” to attend lectures on the subject of anatomy at the university medical center.” (p. 195) In a matter of a few weeks after the amputation, however, the pain started. 

The pains came at night as his body was relaxing and slipping across the uncertain boundary between waking and sleep…He would have the impression that his left leg was numb, and that he absolutely had to get it into the right position—he felt his toes tingling, an unpleasant sensation. He fidgeted, half conscious. He wanted to move his toes, but the unperformability of that movement awoke him completely. He would sit on the bed, tear the blanket off himself, and look at the aching place—it was some thirty centimeters below the knee, there over the rumbled sheet. He would close his eyes and try to scratch it, but he touched nothing, his fingers combed the void in despair, giving him no relief. (p. 203) 

In imagining how Verheyen could respond to his desperation for relief, Tokarczuk draws on his intense interest in preserving human body parts. Before the amputation, he begs the surgeon to “preserve the removed leg.” (p. 193) The surgeon followed Verheyen’s detailed instructions for preparing his amputated limb by placing it “in a glass vessel filled with a balm of Nantes brandy and black pepper.” (p. 193) Verheyen kept it “on his headboard or stretched scarily out on the table.” (p. 196) Eventually, he looks to it as a possible source of relief. 

Once, in a fit of despair, when the pain and itching were driving him mad, he stood and with trembling hands lit a candle. Hopping on one foot, he moved to the table the vessel with the cut-off leg [rested]…He extracted the limb and in the candlelight tried to locate in it the reason for the pain…He sat down on the floor, stretched his legs out before him, and laid the amputated limb on the place just below his left knee. He closed his eyes and groped for the painful place. His hand touched the cold piece of flesh—but could not reach the pain. (pp. 203-204) 

Verheyen’s maneuvers and observations did not provide him relief. With his medical training, he begins thinking about mechanisms that could be causing this excruciating and frustrating phenomenon. 

What is it that awakens me, when I feel pain and suffering, since my leg has been separated from me and is floating now in alcohol? There is nothing pinching it, no reason for its suffering, no such pain that can be logically justified, and yet it exists. Now I look at it and simultaneously feel in it, in the toes, unbearably hot, as though I were submerging it in hot water, and this experience is so real, so obvious, that if I were to shut my eyes, I would see in my own imagination the bucket of water overly heated and my own foot submerged from toes to ankle. I touch my bodily existing limb in the guise of a lump of preserved flesh—and I don’t feel it. I feel, meanwhile, something that does not exist, it is in a physical sense an empty place, there is nothing there that might give any sensation whatsoever. The thing that hurts does not exist. A phantom. Phantom pain. (p. 208)  

He comes up empty. 

Tokarczuk cannot imagine Verheyen would let the issue lie and accept it simply because he is without an anatomical or pathophysiological explanation. She knows that before he began his schooling in medicine, he was studying theology towards becoming a Catholic priest. In fact, in the book and in his real life, the amputation disqualified him from Catholic priesthood. So, Tokarczuk brings his theological training into thoughts he could have about this phenomenon that is torturing him from spiritual realms, and in this way leaving Verheyen to contemplate the mind / body relationship. He concludes, “The body is something absolutely mysterious.” (p. 209)  

It still is.  

Web image generated with Dall-E 2

Actor Clark Middleton wrote this autobiographical dramatic monologue in collaboration with Robert Knopf. Stricken with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at age four, Middleton enacts his early painful experience — painful physically and emotionally. He takes us through an adolescence complicated by physical difference, his interaction with medical professionals over the years, and his craving to become an actor. Middleton struggles with the medical establishment, the pain and humor of coming-of-age, and ultimate self acceptance. Eventually, he was able to have both hip replacement surgery and a career in theater and film. The play is funny, poignant, and instructive.

Miracle Mile was performed in New York City in Fall, 1997 at Theater Row. The New York Times review called the play, “an enriching chronicle of a man who refuses to let the world take him at face value.” Middleton performed his monologue at New York University School of Medicine and at other institutions. Clips of a videotape of the theater performance are available at this web site.

Archive Videos from the Play

Actor Information
Clark Middleton (actor/author) performed MIRACLE MILE Off-Broadway in the fall of 1997. He has appeared in Sam Shephard’s CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS as well as Mr. Shephard’s CHICAGO at the Signature Theatre Company. Clark was in William Hoffman’s AFTER THE ORCHARD and performed MIRACLE MILE at the Invaluable Cape Cod Theater Project. He began his professional career performing with the late Geraldine Page in productions of THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT, PARADISE LOST, and VIVAT VIVAT REGINA. Since that time he has appeared in more than 40 NYC productions, most notably at the New York Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theatre, LaMaMa and Circle Rep, where he appeared with Olympia Dukakis in THE HOPE ZONE. In NYC Clark has directed LONE STAR, OUR DALY BREAD, DOMINO COURTS, CALL IT CLOVER and KIDNAPPED. He also directed MARVIN’S ROOM at The Wayside Theatre in Virginia. Clark can be seen in the films BAIL JUMPER, STORIES FROM NEW YORK, THE CONTENDERS and DON’T SHOOT DARLING. Clark plays the forensics expert Ellis on NBC-TV’s LAW & ORDER. He is a native of Tucson, Arizona and a member of both the Lab Theater Company and the 42nd Street Workshop.

Clark died on October 4, 2020. He was 63 years old.

Director Michael Warren Powell
Leading Actors Clark Middleton
Video Courtesy of Michelle Bouchard
Original Date of Entry 07/12/06

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Web Photo by Alex Radelich 

Jurecic’s astutely researched, nuanced answers to those questions propose a corrective to the extreme skepticism of “disembodied criticism.” Such criticism, she claims, dismisses testimonial writing from “a position of distance and privilege.”  At the same time, her answers affirm that intellectually “rigorous” responses to texts are central to the critical humanities (15). To support her position, she offers attentive readings of illness narratives by Virginia Woolf, Reynolds Price, and Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as the theoretical writing of literary and other scholars.  For instance, Jurecic speculates that the condition of a reader’s body aligns with their responses to texts. In a chapter called “Theory’s Aging Body,” she observes that as skeptical scholarly readers aged—think of Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler—they turned their attention to “illness, vulnerability, and mortality” (93).  Jurecic also suggests that criticism’s function to expose cultural conditions turns illness stories into critiques of the effects of contemporary medicine on our experiences of vulnerability and mortality. The relatively new concept of living “at risk” is a case in point. Stories about living with the risk of experiencing a particular illness in the future leave potential patients with uncertainty,” prompting narratives that seek the “personal meaning of the impersonal statistics” that medical encounters now regularly deliver (18).   

Jurecic also reflects on the ways theorists have understood the possibilities of representing and responding to pain in the varied approaches of philosophical thinkers Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, along with anthropologists Jean E. Jackson, Byron Good, and Veena Das. In an exceptionally comprehensive and nuanced reading of Susan Sontag’s theoretical, fictional, and journal writing about suffering, Jurecic uncovers Sontag’s inconsistent, yet revelatory positions on the human capacity for responding to representations of pain. The chapter on Sontag is enriched by Jurecic’s reading of Annie Lebovitz’s controversial photographs of Sontag’s final days (included in A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005) and David Reiff’s responses to Sontag’s suffering in his memoir about his mother’s illnesses (Swimming in a Sea of Death).   

Illness as Narrative closes with examples of what Jurecic calls reparative writing and reading practices. Reparative writers, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Jurecic claims, both create “a more coherent sense of themselves” and dislodge culturally “fixed ideas and narratives” about illness or disability (109). Her discussion of reparative reading considers the limits of two competing readings of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. One assumes that readers will empathically and unreflectively imagine those who are culturally different from themselves. The other looks skeptically at the assumption that what medical educators call cultural competence can be acquired by reading a book. Jurecic suggests that strategies for reading and teaching informed by Janelle S. Taylor, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rita Felski encourage more complex habits of response, such as Taylor’s concept of “’empathic curiosity’” (122).    

Illness as Narrative poses questions so central to discussions in the medical humanities that it should be read by those who teach in the health professions and disciplines. Jurecic’s book advances the groundbreaking case made by Arthur Frank that illness narratives contribute not only to medicine, but also to contemporary culture and individual lives. Since Illness as Narrative rigorously addresses questions of how to respond to and teach the literature of suffering, it has consequential implications for literary studies and the critical humanities more generally. It exemplifies how a marginalized sub-field can offer a perspective that the dominant theories in the larger discipline fail to notice. Perhaps the most urgent professional question Jurecic asks is what we lose if writers and readers attuned to the ill or suffering body are not heard in critical discussions. Fortunately, Jurecic’s clear, jargon-free prose and the texts she writes about also welcome readers in disciplines beyond literary studies and health humanities into the conversation.  

Illness as Narrative: 
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822961901/

Arlene Croce: 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/12/26/discussing-the-undiscussable

Arthur Frank:  
The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2^nd ed. Univ of Chicago Press, 2013. (Orig. 1995) 

Illness as Narrative 
By Ann Jurecic 
University of Pittsbugh Press: 2012, 192 Pages 
Web Photo by Mostafa Saeed 

The narrator has enjoyed a mostly healthy life. He has traveled to Europe and once was treated for syphilis while there. He has been together with L for seven years. Both men are writers who teach at the university. Now, the pain that grips him defies exact description (even for a professional writer). The closest comparison that he can conjure is having someone’s hand plunge into his body and twist his guts along with the sensation of being kneed in the groin. He’s reluctant to seek medical attention since medical facilities are especially risky during the pandemic. So he waits and hurts. The pain is soon accompanied by fever, chills, and aching of the limbs. 

He decides to go to urgent care. After a brief evaluation, he’s referred to the university medical center ER. Covid testing is negative. A CT scan reveals an aortic dissection (tear in the aorta) associated with aortitis (an inflammation of this large blood vessel). He is told that such a tear is frequently fatal. He’s lucky to be alive. The narrator is placed in the ICU and treated with IV antibiotics, fluids, and antihypertensive medications. The vascular surgeon recommends holding off on any operation (either a stent or a graft), hoping the tear and inflammation will stabilize and heal. 

Hospitalized for a week and a half, the narrator confesses his feelings of helplessness, shame, bewilderment, and fear. He is intrigued by the bustle of the hospital – almost electric with human energy – but despondent over the seemingly omnipresent suffering there – his own, that of fellow patients, and even the distress of healthcare workers. He is most impressed by and appreciative of his ICU nurse, Alivia. As for the physicians involved in his care, the narrator notes the stark clinical detachment of many doctors. Reflecting on a visit from a rheumatologist, he concludes, “I was nothing to her, really, I was her job, she would clock out and enter her real life” (p124). He craves to sense some vulnerability and genuine concern emanating from his physicians. As for empathy, the narrator reveals some of his own when he decides, “it must be hell to be a resident” (p129) in training. 

The search for possible rare etiologies of his condition comes up empty. As his condition slowly improves, the narrator still worries about his current predicament and the future: “I was an enigma, they said, a conundrum, they were running out of ideas” (p121). The waiting for and indecision about any kind of surgical intervention wears on him. He wonders if it might be best to have an operation. 

But the narrator never has surgery. A repeat CT scan confirms stability of the aorta and resolution of all inflammation. He is discharged home on oral medicines and continued IV antibiotics. Frequent follow-up appointments with his doctors and imaging studies of his aorta are scheduled. His partner L lovingly tends to his needs. His sister G arrives to help too. The narrator’s prognosis is murky. Did he dodge a bullet? Or are further problems with his aorta inevitable? How does a person cope with such chronic uncertainty. Although the narrator is weak and emotionally rattled, he is happy to be alive, pain-free, ambulatory, and home with his lover. Shouldn’t that be enough? 

The novel reads more like a memoir than a work of fiction. It is impressively authentic and accurate about medical matters – the lingo and professional behavior of physicians, nursing care, clinical procedures, what it feels like to be a patient. Readers will rightfully consider whether the book’s author is perhaps recounting his own experience with a serious health problem.  

In this novel, the human body is depicted in many ways: sensuous, serviceable, surrendered to others, surreal when sick. The narrator’s experience of illness includes a warping of time, the pull of memory, the weight of regret, the need for truth, and the magic of love.  

The poet-protagonist is occasionally irritated by the language and metaphors spewed by doctors and nurses. The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics is explained to him as a “carpet bomb approach.” He is warned about the caustic effect of IV drugs and that his veins might “burn out.” This medical lexicon prompts the narrator to ponder “who taught these people, who gave them their vocabulary, their stock of images” (p86).  

We don’t need a novel (even an exceptional one like Small Rain) to remind us about the randomness and chaos of ordinary life, the uncertainty of health in the future. But we can look to great literature for inspiration, to help us understand and cope with those looming, difficult experiences. The word rain is both a noun (drops of moisture or a spiritual blessing) and a verb (something sent down in abundance). Whether it is tears (of pain and emotion), love, or gratitude, the rain in this story is hardly small.  

Small Rain: A Novel 
by Garth Greenwell 
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 320 pages 
ISBN 9780374279547 
Web photo by Pawel Nolbert 

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.

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