Summary:

Dr. Terry McKechnie works in the emergency room in a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1990’s, and is having an affair with Virginia Lee, the new wife of an old friend of his from medical school. Virginia works with snakes. She is attracted to danger. She falls in love with Terry immediately after deciding to marry the reliable Rick, with his predictable dermatologist’s hours and habits.

Virginia is bitten by a rare snake and drives herself to Terry’s hospital. The drive is terrifyingly described, time seeming to move at two speeds at once, as Virginia sits stuck in traffic trying not to panic, the terse prose capturing her efforts at clarity even as the rapid effects of the venom begin to cloud her thoughts. Because she is allergic to horses, the antivenom, made of horse serum, cannot be given to her, and she begins to bleed. Unfortunately, she also has an extremely rare blood type.

As well as being a doctor, Terry is a "universal donor": his blood can be given to people with most other blood types without danger of rejection. His gift fails him at this point, however: Virginia must be given blood of her own type. One person has such blood: a psychopath on the run from the police whom Terry had previously allowed to escape. The novel’s plot culminates in Terry’s search for and encounter with the convict, in which he persuades him to give his blood (and, necessarily his freedom--he is arrested in the hospital) and Virginia survives.

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Summary:

This short prose poem (a single paragraph) concisely tells a powerful story. A composer at an artist's colony believes he has fallen in love with a woman of almost sixty, a Japanese painter. One night, late, at her door, she acknowledges their mutual desire, but warns him that she has had a double mastectomy. He leaves her, apologizing. In the morning he finds that she has left a bowl on his doorstep, filled with dead bees covered by a layer of rose petals.

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Summary:

May's Lion is really two stories in one: the first is narrated by a woman who knew May, the story's protagonist, when the narrator was a child, and she retells the story May told her about the time a sick mountain lion came into her yard. Uncertain of what to do, she called the sheriff's office. Police officers shot the lion because, according to May, "there was nothing else they knew how to do."

The second story is the narrator's fictionalized recounting of May's story. In this version, May (now called "Rains End") finds the lion in her yard, and in spite of her own fear she believes he has come for a reason. She offers the animal a bowl of milk, and sings softly to soothe him. She realizes "He had come for company in dying; that was all." This she offers him, and the lion dies there in her yard.

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Summary:

In Balsamroot, Mary Clearman Blew explores the life story of her beloved aunt, who has recently developed dementia. The memoir artfully interweaves the stories of the author's struggle to cope with her aunt's condition and find the best care for her; her aunt's past as revealed in newly discovered diaries; the author's reconciliation with her estranged daughter; her coming to terms with a broken love relationship from the past (spurred on by her discovery of a thwarted love in her aunt's past).

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Summary:

The Giant's House is narrated by Peggy Cort, a young librarian in a small Cape Cod town in the early 1950s. She falls in love--and her life becomes inextricably tangled--with James Sweatt, a young boy who suffers from gigantism.

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Summary:

The poem's omniscient speaker describes the inhabitants of an "Old Ladies' Home" with bleak and dehumanizing detachment. In the first of the three seven-line stanzas, the fragile elderly women appear "like beetles" who "creep out" of the institution's buildings for the day. Their habits and relationships are observed in the second stanza: knitting, and children who are "distant and cold as photos," with "grandchildren nobody knows."

Presaging the arrival of death in the last stanza, the ladies wear black, "sharded" in it, but even the "best black fabric" is stained red and green by age. In the evening they are called in by the nurses, "ghosts" who "hustle them off the lawn" to their beds, which resemble coffins, and where Death waits.

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Summary:

This is a collection of twenty-six first-hand accounts by women institutionalized in mental hospitals or "asylums" in America between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of World War II. The book is divided into four historical periods, each introduced by the editors with an essay contextualizing the narratives in relation to the history of the psychiatric establishment, and to the roles, perceptions, and experiences of women in American culture.

The accounts are all extracts from works published by the writers, usually as attempts to expose the injustices of the mental health system. Most of the writers are not well known, with the exceptions of the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the actress Frances Farmer, whose account concludes the book [see film annotation in this data base: Frances].

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Summary:

In Book I Oliver Sacks describes his visit to Pingelap and Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands (now a part of the Federated States of Micronesia). On Pingelap (population 700) 5-10% of the people are completely colorblind; i.e. they have a rare hereditary condition called achromatopsia in which the retina has no functional cone cells. Rod cells, which normally provide peripheral and night vision, are their only source of vision. While partial colorblindness is common, achromatopsia is normally very rare. Sacks and Knut Nordby, a Norwegian scientist who is himself achromatopic, examined dozens of achromatopes on Pingelap and in a village of Pingelapese people on the larger Pohnpei.

In Book II Sacks takes the reader to Guam where he investigates (with his friend John Steele, a neurologist who lives on the island) the neurological disease called "lytico-bodig." The "lytico" form of this disease is a progressive paralysis similar to amyotropic lateral sclerosis, while the "bodig" form resembles parkinsonism. Both appeared in Guam after the Second World Way and now seem to be dying out. However, no one has ever determined their cause.

Sacks tells the story of his visit, while also discussing various hypotheses that have been considered and discarded over forty years of study. The last section of the book describes a trip to Rota, a small island north of Guam, where Sacks visits a forest of cycad trees and discusses his life-long fascination with these primitive plants.

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Summary:

Determined not to like Ruth Thomas, Ann Stanley is immediately smitten by her charm and force of personality, and especially by her vitality--a vitality that too soon succumbs to breast cancer. As one of a cadre of women almost obsessively devoted to the care of a dying Ruth, Ann nurses Ruth through her final illness, until--in a move curiously like the decision of Charity (also dying of cancer) to keep Sid, her husband, sequestered from her final trip to the hospital, in Wallace Stegner's far superior novel, Crossing to Safety--Ruth flies to Florida to die at her brother's house.

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Summary:

Showalter identifies clusters of syndromes, or mini-epidemics, which she suggests represent late-twentieth century manifestations of the entity which was called hysteria in nineteenth century western culture. Opening with the history of psychiatry's involvement in hysteria in the time of Charcot and Freud, she traces the replacement of hysteria or conversion reaction by modern hysterical analogues such as: chronic fatigue syndrome, recovered memory, Gulf War syndrome, multiple personality syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, and alien abduction.

In separate chapters she examines each of these entities--how it presents, how it fits into her theory of mass hysteria as a cultural response to the millennium, and how it is being handled by health care professionals. Showalter contends that "Redefining hysteria as a universal human response to emotional conflict is a better course than evading, denying, or projecting its realities." (p. 17)

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