The clock‐drawing test: reading temporalities of dementia from clinical chart notes

Abstract

The clock‐drawing test, a cognitive screening test widely used clinically, is here taken as a window onto forms of temporality present in clinical encounters involving dementia. Drawing on close reading of clinical notes from their medical records, I offer imagistic silhouettes of three older adults in the Seattle area who had no living spouse or children when they developed dementia. Attending to temporality in these records brings clinical interactions into focus as part of the fundamental relationality of dementia, even as attending dementia highlights the fundamental relationality of time. The article examines how small‐scale singularities of time in the clinic bear the imprint of collective temporal registers, including cultural expectations of the life course and larger histories of labour and medicine – and how dementia can unsettle these forms and layers of temporality. Both temporality and dementia alike, I argue, are thoroughly social, historical, and embodied phenomena, their disorientations tangled up together for the time being.