Summary:

This is a collection of 14 contemporary patients' accounts of dealing with their illness or injury. (The patients, four men and ten women, including the editors, are all writers.) Among them the stories cover numerous medical conditions: erythroblastosis, environmental illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hip dysplasia, osteoarthritis, hip replacement, H.I.V., Crohn's disease, broken leg, ruptured cervical disc, myelitis, rheumatoid arthritis, paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, lupus, alcoholism, multiple sclerosis, diabetic retinopathy, breast cancer, severe facial scarring, and depression. The collection is unified by a focus on selfhood--the recovery, discovery, or reconstruction of the psyche that the editors propose is the deepest form of healing.

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In this collection, twenty-two authors take up the subject of wanting a baby and what happens to one's self-image and marriage/relationship when difficulties arise. All the contributors are accomplished writers--e.g. Amy Hempel, Michael Bérubé, Tama Janowitz--who tell stories of the miracles, disapppointments and sometimes horrors of the various reproductive technologies; the experience of childlessness when one/a couple desperately wants one; the joys of "success" via technology or adoption; what happens when every method fails.

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The editor, herself a writer and one who has suffered depressive episodes, collects a series of personal essays or illness narratives about experiences with depression. Her contributors are all artists, primarily writers, who generally but not exclusively speak to the relationship between their art and their mood disorders. Some of the essays included have been previously published, but most are original contributions to this collection. The collection is introduced by Kay Redfield Jamison whose academic work has examined the relationship between creativity and depression, including manic-depressive disease.

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Kirklin, a physician and Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the Royal Free and University College Medical School, and Richardson, a historian and associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, are both educators in medical humanities in London. This well-written and concise volume focuses on "the role of the humanities in medical education" and is aimed at "those wishing to integrate medical humanities into their own teaching, and learning." (p. xv) The chapters are written by a variety of educators with a wide range of backgrounds, including artist, medical student, writer, nurse, surgeon and philosopher.

At least two stimuli are cited as reasons for the development of this book: (1) the 1993 publication by the General Medical Council of Tomorrow's Doctors which recommends the inclusion of medical humanities in the required curriculum for undergraduate medical education in the UK and (2) a national conference, "The healing arts: The role of the humanities in medical education" in London, March, 2000. The rationale for such a book is delineated in several prefatory statements including remarks by Professors Sir David Weatherall and Sir K. George M. M. Alberti (Alberti is the president of the Royal College of Physicians). The book concludes with recommendations for further reading, schemata for undergraduate and graduate degrees in medical humanities at University of Wales, Swansea, and an index.

The nine chapters in this volume combine pedagogic philosophy, citations for literature and art and how to encourage reflection about these selections, tools for encouraging student creativity, reproductions of art and literature generated by students or patients or used by teachers for discussion, and some practical advice about teaching medical humanities and its, at times, uneasy connection to the rest of the curriculum. Each chapter reflects the individual contributor's area of expertise and experience. For example, in "Fostering the creativity of medical students", the authors Heather Allan, Michele Petrone (who painted the striking cover art), and Deborah Kirklin provide useful guides for teaching creative writing and art production by students studying cancer and genetic disease.

In a particularly insightful chapter, "Medical humanities for postgraduates: an integrated approach and its implications for teaching," Martyn Evans describes the challenges of developing a full-fledged interdisciplinary program for graduate as well as undergraduate studies in Wales. He addresses concerns about "bolt-on" versus integration of medical humanities in the curriculum, risks of superficiality, and how such studies may transform the culture of modern medicine. Several chapters address a theme (such as "clinical detachment" or understanding the patient's perspective) and include topic-specific sources and guidelines.

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The purpose of this collection of essays written by teachers of literature and medicine is to serve as a guide for those who are preparing courses or seminars in the field. The collection is divided into four sections, each one approaching the theory and pedagogy of the discipline in a different way: one section is made up of model courses; a second views the subject matter from the standpoint of individual texts, authors, or genres; the third takes a broader look at some effects of literature on the practice of medicine and/or nursing and the role illness and medicine have played in the creation of literature; the fourth is a collection of resources available in the field. There is blurring of some of the boundaries of the sections, but read in the whole, the collection provides a good sense of the way medicine and literature is being taught in this country at this time.

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This collection about the experience of suffering and recovery from physical and emotional illness is unique in that each essay is composed by an established writer who uses his or her literary skills in the rendering of the narrative. The nature of the illnesses lived varies from chronic depression to a broken leg, from progressive and potentially fatal disease to the intermittent disability of connective tissue disorder.

Some of the stories are poetic in their use of metaphor and symbol, others are circumspect about the reality of the effect of illness, as well as healing, on the creative process. Together, they make an interesting cross-section of narrative responses to disruption of life plans.

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Carl Elliott and John Lantos have brought together a collection of 12 essays that explore the complex work and person of Walker Percy. Personal reflections and stories capture the importance of Walker Percy in the lives and work of several of the essayists, while others offer commentaries on various aspects of Percy's life and work. All of the contributors reveal their affection and appreciation of Walker Percy as physician, novelist, and philosopher.

In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Coles, who was Percy's friend; Ross McElwee, the documentary filmmaker; Jay Tolson, Percy's biographer; author and historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown; scholars Martha Montello and Laurie Zoloth; and physicians Brock Eide, Richard Martinez, and David Schiedermayer.

The collection covers many topics and themes. Percy's biography is reviewed: the early losses of his father and grandfather by suicide, the early death of his mother, his medical education and subsequent struggle with tuberculosis, his turn from medicine to philosophy and literature, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and his long and productive life as a philosophic novelist.

The essays explore Percy as both physician and patient, and how, as diagnostic novelist, he gives us characters and stories that caution about the technologic-scientific worldview that dominates not only medicine but western life. The many wayfarers are discussed, including Binx Bolling from The Moviegoer, Will Barrett from The Last Gentleman, and Dr. Tom Moore from Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. [These novels have been annotated in this database.]

Percy's spiritual and religious views are reviewed, along with his moral concerns about a post-modern world before anyone had coined the term. The problems of isolation, alienation, and struggle for meaning are apparent in all of his works, and many of the essayists explore the connection between his novels and these existential concerns. The importance of Kierkegaard in his work, his theory of language, and his early essays are discussed.

The contributors give examples of how Walker Percy's life and work are incorporated in medical education and the practice of medicine, both in personal and theoretical terms. Percy's work reminds practitioners of the necessity for human connection in the midst of scientific and technologic paradigms that distance practitioner from patient. Likewise, medicine and medical education shaped Percy the novelist, where keen observation and sustained searching for answers are to be found in all of his fiction.

A feminist critique of Percy's development of women characters, reflections on physician characters in Percy's work, his personal struggle with a family history of depression, and his attitudes about psychiatry and psychoanalysis complete the collection.

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The editor of this volume has pulled together a collection of essays directed toward the history of women as healers. The essays are divided into two groups--the first dealing with women healers in the medieval and renaissance periods of Europe, and the second addressing the emergence of professionalism, beginning with an essay on women physicians in ancient Greece, Rome and the Byzantine Empire and moving quickly to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, England, Australia and America.

The subject matter of each essay reflects the period covered. Most use definitive examples of individual women healers who were either unusually effective or who reflect the struggles women had with the existing local social or medical hierarchy in gaining the opportunity to train for or practice their chosen profession.

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