While in Oslo, Norway visiting family, Russell Teagarden went to the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) to speak with Øystein Ustvedt, who is a curator and noted expert on the art of Edvard Munch. The interview concentrates on Munch’s work expressing emotional dimensions of anxiety, illness, grief, and suffering. Ustvedt talks about how Munch’s life story explains the sources for his empathy and artistic inclinations, identifies and discusses the paintings particularly effective in expressing emotions illness and suffering generate, and considers how Munch’s work could benefit health professions students and practitioners. Russell’s 5½-year-old granddaughter teaches him how to say, “National Museum” and “goodbye,” in Norwegian, with varying success.

Links to paintings discussed:
Puberty (1894)
The Sick Child (1885)
Spring (1891) 
Sick Girl (Christian Krogh, 1881)
Death in the Sickroom (1893)
The Spanish Flu (1919)
Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-1943)
Melancholy (1892)
The Scream (1893)

Link to Russell Teagarden’s blog piece in According to the Arts on Øystein Ustvedt’s book, Edvard Munch: An Inner Life.
Link to National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo

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 from Wikipedia Commons

Three Paintings by Edvard Munch

Felice Aull 07.23.26 127

Edvard Munch transformed personal family tragedies into haunting paintings that reveal illness, grief, isolation, and…