Summary:

In 1942, Beth Pierce was completing her internship in the new discipline of occupational therapy in a Baltimore hospital where she meets Jim, a conscientious objector who is training to become a medic. They share a love of poetry and the arts. He goes off to war and serves in the foxholes and trenches of the dreadful conditions at the front. She stays in North America serving in rehabilitation with the war wounded – young men damaged physically and mentally from the great trauma. Until 1945, they exchange a remarkable series of letters that describe the war, their parallel work with the war wounded, their hopes for the future, and gratitude for each other’s thoughts. The letters always close with “Please write.”

View full annotation

Summary:

“Tithonus” is a dramatic monologue that imagines the once handsome, magnificent Trojan prince to be well-advanced in an unfortunate state brought about by negligent gods and his own lack of foresight.  Exultant over the blessings of his youth, he’d asked Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for eternal life, and she had obtained Zeus’s permission to grant the request.  But Tithonus had failed to ask for eternal youth with his immortality—and neither Aurora nor Zeus had managed to recognize that this feature of the request might be important—so that Tithonus spends eternity growing increasingly decrepit.  In Tennyson’s poem, Tithonus addresses Aurora, hoping he might persuade her to reassign him his mortal status and allow him to die.

View full annotation

Summary:

Born in 1894, Grania becomes deaf following scarlet fever at the age of two. Her mother never quite recovers from misplaced guilt over this outcome and is withdrawn. But Grania is well loved by the whole family, who run a hotel in a small town. Her older sister and their Irish-born grandmother see the child's intelligence and find ways to communicate with her by signs and words; they urge the parents to send her to a special school.By age nine, Grania is sent to the famous School for the Deaf in Belleville Ontario, founded by Alexander Graham Bell. Although the school is only a short distance from her home on the north shore of Lake Ontario, the child is not allowed to return for nine long months. At first she is overwhelmed with homesickness, but soon she finds kindred spirits among the other students and teachers and adapts to the life of the institution.

By 1915, her studies complete, Grania works at the school. There, she meets her future husband, Jim, a hearing man who is assistant to the town doctor. They marry, but only two weeks later, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer in the war in Europe. Fear and death haunt the people at home and abroad for years. Jim writes what little he is allowed of the horror and danger around him, always promising to return. Grania waits and writes too, slowly growing hopeless and angry, as devastating telegrams arrive one after the other.Her sister copes with the return of a grievously disfigured husband, wounded more in mind than in body. In late 1918, Grania falls ill in the influenza epidemic and is delirious for weeks. When she recovers, frail and bald, she learns of the loss of her beloved grandmother who died of the fever caught by nursing her. At the same moment she hears of the war's end and begins to believe again in hope.

View full annotation

Summary:

The aim of these reflections on uncertainty in medicine is not to discredit evidence-based medicine or to incite suspicion of the careful and caring processes by which most clinicians arrive at the advice they give.  Rather it is to change conversations among practitioners and between them and their patients in such a way as to raise everyone’s tolerance for the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties we live with.  If the public were more aware of the basic rules of mathematical probabilities, how statisticians understand the term “significance,” and of how much changes when one new variable is taken into account—when a new medication with multiple possible side-effects is added to the mix, for instance—they might, Hatch argues, be less inclined to insist on specific predictions.  He goes on to suggest that there is something to be gained from the challenge of living without the solid ground of assurances.  When we recognize the need to make decisions with incomplete information (a condition that seems, after all, to be our common lot) we may refocus on the moment we’re in and see its peculiar possibilities. Changing the conversation requires a critical look at medical education which, Hatch observes, “measures a certain type of knowledge essential to medical practice, but it consequently engenders a conception of medicine best described as overly certain . . . .” 

View full annotation

Summary:

In 1951, Eileen Tumulty, the novel’s main character, was nine years old and living with her Irish immigrant parents in the Woodside section of Queens, New York. The novel follows Eileen straight through the next 60 years, but concentrates on the years covering the time of her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease.    

Eileen was forced to learn how to manage a household at a very young age when first her mother was kept in a hospital for 8 months after a hysterectomy, and then again when her mother became incapacitated by alcoholism. Eileen had reason to think this life was her destiny until she accompanied her father to a better part of Queens. There she saw “places…that contained more happiness than ordinary places did.” She concluded, “unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were.” (pp. 15-16) Eileen’s ambition was ignited. While continuing to manage the household and care for her mother, she does well in school, becomes a nurse, and eventually moves up the nursing management at various hospitals.  

Eileen’s ambitions encompassed ideas on her eventual mate. She chooses Ed Leary despite hoping for someone who was not quite so Irish and not quite so much of the same place. Ed was a promising neuroscience graduate student who she thought could be a high achiever with the right motivation: “If there was anything she could help him with, it was thinking big.” (p. 97) Her motivation was not enough and neither were the many offers he received from life science companies. He became a professor at a local community college. He had a passion for teaching students who attend community colleges and he could never see himself anywhere else—for love or money. Ed’s intransigence frustrated Eileen, but she accepted it and plowed ahead. She studied the possible ways of escaping the old neighborhood and also delivered a son she thought she’d never have after years of futile efforts.  

It doesn’t go smoothly. While she is getting surer of where they would go, Ed begins to exhibit disconcerting behaviors. For them to live in Bronxville, Eileen will have to accept a house that needs a lot of money and attention to rehabilitate. The remainder of the story is about how Eileen simultaneously manages Ed’s rapid deterioration from what eventually is diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, her job requirements, and a son progressing from adolescence through college.  

We Are Not Ourselves touches on many of the aspects involved in prolonged illness including the daily struggles managing the care of someone with progressive dementia, complexities of health care delivery systems, frustrations with byzantine health care coverage, and threats to relationships among the individual family members with one another, and the grace that can manifest during the bleakest moments. The author does not dwell on all these issues, but gives them enough attention so that their effects will be recognizable to many readers who have experienced them. In doing so, he was able to draw from his own experiences with his father who was stricken with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

View full annotation

Summary:

View full annotation

Summary:

The play is set in 1947 (the year it premiered) in New Orleans. Having lost their ancestral Mississippi home to creditors, Blanche Dubois arrives at the shabby French Quarter flat of her sister Stella. When we first meet Blanche she explains she is on a leave of absence from teaching high school English on account of her “nerves.” From her first meeting with Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski, a World War II vet, we detect class conflict and sexual tension between the two of them. As Blanche’s visit becomes more and more protracted, Stanley becomes increasingly suspicious of her motives and background. Meanwhile, she begins to date Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker buddies. Gradually we learn more about Blanche’s checkered past. She was once married to a young man who committed suicide after she discovered him in a sexual encounter with another man. Stanley uncovers rumors that she was fired from her teaching job for having sex with a student. As the play progresses, fueled by her surreptitious drinking, Blanche’s mental state unravels. When Stanley warns Mitch about Blanche’s notorious reputation, Mitch rejects her.  Adding insult to injury, while Stella is having a baby, Stanley rapes his sister-in-law. Blanche’s emotional deterioration is complete. In the final scene, a doctor and nurse arrive to take Blanche to a mental hospital. She initially resists them, but when the doctor helps her up she willingly surrenders: “Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"(p. 178).

View full annotation

Summary:

In this volume, Gonzalez-Crussi trains his sights on medical history, applying his lyrical writing skills to essays that he hopes will help preserve the humanistic core of the medical profession. Because of its brevity (250 pages), he apologizes for its focus on "Western medicine since the inception of the scientific method"(p.xi), but does note that he acknowledges "the continuity between ancient and modern medicine...[and] the contributions of the Orient, and of epochs predating the dominance of the rational spirit" (p.xi).What distinguishes this volume beyond the writing is the thematic organization. It begins with the Rise of Anatomy and Surgery, but then moves to Vitalism and Mechanism, The Mystery of Procreation,  and Pestilence and Mankind, before finishing with a look at Concepts of Disease, The Diagnostic Process and Therapy (including a brief focus on psychiatry). In the last section, Some Concluding Thoughts, Gonzalez-Crussi returns to his motivations for writing this short history, citing the mixed blessings of scientific progress whose gains, for example, are offset by those who "appear to try to 'medicalize' every aspect of human life" (p.210).

View full annotation

Summary:

After first meeting as college roommates, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm make their way through college and then onto New York City to pursue career interests. We follow them through the subsequent decades as Jude becomes a highly effective attorney, Willem a famous actor, JB an acclaimed artist, and Malcolm a prize-winning architect.  

What starts as a cluster of four eventually separates into an orbit of Willem, JB, and Malcolm around Jude at the center. The gravitational force pulling the three others towards Jude is the fidelity that can form among college roommates and a love that has bonded them together even more. But, there is also a strong sense among the three that Jude needs them for both physical and emotional support. At first, and for a good long time, it’s just a sense, but they later come to learn that their intuitions are right, that Jude does indeed need them and why. Over the years covered in the novel, a second orbit forms around Jude comprising a surgeon-cum-close friend, adoptive parents, a work colleague, and a neighbor. They, too, know Jude needs them, but only learn why late into their relationships. Until then, they are alternatively and often simultaneously worried, angry, flummoxed, and stymied about what’s at the root of his ambulatory limitations and severe leg pains, and why he cuts himself with terrifying frequency.  

Through a fractured narrative sprinkled with artfully-constructed subliminal hints, Yanagihara reveals Jude’s life before he arrived at college. She tells of Jude’s beginnings as a foundling taken in at a monastery. This hopeful start for Jude, however, becomes a childhood and adolescence of unrelenting, horrific, sexual assault and torture—when at the monastery, when on the road after being kidnapped by a monastery brother, when in protective custody, and even when he is able to escape. He arrives at college bearing the psychological and physical consequences of these experiences, but not openly displayed to a degree that yields more than a few hints of a traumatic past. With the support of the people surrounding him in  his adult life, he is able to become a highly accomplished attorney, and to achieve some measure of ease and happiness from time to time. The support he receives, however, is not enough to protect him from the consequences of further psychological and physical assaults, including his self-mutilation practices, and tragic losses. Ultimately, Jude engineers his own final tragedy.  

Some of the people left behind suffer from more than Jude’s loss. His friend the surgeon wonders whether he enabled Jude’s self-cutting by always patching him up and never committing him to an inpatient psychiatric unit. Jude’s adoptive father relives the loss of his first son at a very young age to a rare, degenerative, neurological disease. Nearly all the figures in this novel experience suffering in some form or another, but this is more the story of Jude; how the people around him tried to get him past the horrors of his childhood and adolescence, but eventually and sadly to no avail. 

View full annotation

Summary:

This is the third book in a series on the history of medicine and medical education by Kenneth M. Ludmerer, a practicing physician and historian of medicine at Washington University of St. Louis. The first, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education, published in 1985, dealt with the history of medical schools and medical education in the US from their origins in the 19th century to the late 20th century. In 1999 he published Time to Heal: Medical Education from 1900 to the Era of Managed Care. This book, Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine, published in 2015, is a sweeping history of graduate medical education in the United States from its inception to the current day.

In 13 chapters and 431 pages (334 pages of text, 97 of reference and index), Ludmerer traces the residency from early apprenticeship days to its metamorphosis (at Johns Hopkins, of which he is a justly proud medical school alumnus) into the embryonic form of what we now call an internship and residency. Giants like “The Four Doctors” (to use the title of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of William S. Halsted, William Osler, Howard A. Kelly and William H. Welch - but known simply as “The Big Four” at Hopkins) were the godfathers of the American postgraduate medical model which emphasized clinical science, teaching, patient care and research. The rise of acute care teaching hospitals as the venue of postgraduate medical education, and not the medical school or university, is an interesting story and one which Ludmerer tells in great detail over a number of chapters. It is one replete with predictable turf wars, professional turmoil and politics, and societal change in all aspects of the 20th century. This last phenomenon receives its due attention in every chapter but is dissected in meticulous detail in the final chapters dealing with the Libby Zion case, duty hours and the increasing role of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in postgraduate medical education.

Beginning in the 1930’s, American medicine grew increasingly specialized and, in the ensuing decades, subspecialized, much to the consternation of pre-WW II general practitioners who, suddenly and for the first time, found themselves in the minority, in numbers and in influence, of their own profession. Concomitant with the phenomenon of specialization was the imprimatur by academic medicine of the structured, sanctioned residency as the sole route to specialty practice with, of course, the birth of associated accrediting agencies. Along with the move, physically, academically and politically, of postgraduate medical education to acute care teaching hospitals, the control of this education moved from medical schools to the profession at large.

Ludmerer deftly describes the “era of abundance”, the salad days of postgraduate medical education in the 1950’s and 1960’s when giants still made rounds on the floors of postgraduate medical venues; funds were plentiful; outside criticism was an as yet unborn bête noir; and social, economic and governmental curbs were only a tiny distant cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Ludmerer is correct in attributing much of medicine’s professional and social hegemony as well as its transient immunity to criticism in this era to the following evident successes of medicine: antibiotics; initial inroads into antineoplastic therapies; startling technological innovations in imaging; a burgeoning spate of life-saving vaccines; and spectacular advances in surgery, especially pediatric, cardiothoracic and transplant. Fatal diseases of the 1930’s and 1940’s were now often cured in days and of historical interest only.

Like all salad days, those of medicine eventually succumbed to new historical forces: foreign medical graduates in the workplace; the ever-growing financial burden of the residency; and economic pressures like Medicare and its associated regulation. There were other factors, too: professional and societal expectations of standardization and quality care; the explosion in subspecialties; the horrid wastefulness of unnecessary diagnostic tests and therapies borne of an earlier undisciplined abundance; the supercession of the intimate primary physician-patient relationship by the fragmented care of specialists and the rising supremacy of technology over personalized histories and careful physical examinations (why percuss the abdomen when you can get a CAT scan?). Dissatisfaction amongst residents is a dominant theme Ludmerer rightly raises early and often: the conflict and tension between education and service, between reasonable work and “scut”, between being a student and a worker (at times, quite a lowly one).

”High throughput” - the much more rapid turnaround time between admission to an hospital and discharge - has radically changed forever the entire nature of postgraduate medical education, and not for the better in the eyes of the author and of this reviewer, who were fellow residents a lifetime ago at Washington University in St. Louis. This decreased length of stay, a result of the remarkable improvements in diagnosis and therapy mentioned above, meant that the working life of providers (attending physicians, residents, physician assistants and nurses) was in high gear from admission to discharge, thereby increasing tension, likelihood for error and, exponentially, the workload for the resident while simultaneously and irrevocably damaging the possibility of a meaningful, careful provider-patient relationship (like a friendship, of which it is a subspecies, such relationships can not be rushed) and decreasing opportunities for learning. Medicare; changing patient populations; societal and professional disgruntlement; the Libby Zion mess and the ensuing cascade of regulations from all sides, but most especially the ACGME - all receive careful and systematic treatment in the final chapters of this monograph.

Ludmerer ends with a chapter listing what he sees as opportunities for achieving (or re-achieving) excellence. Indeed, he has made it the book’s subtitle. They are the following: a plea for the ACGME to revise its 2011 duty-hour regulations; an equally earnest hope that interns and residents will soon realize a more manageable patient load; a related wish for academic medicine to decrease the unfortunate occurrence of economic exploitation of house officers; a suggestion that this annotator shares, i.e., that the process of supervision, improved (but inadequately) with recent ACGME requirements, be further strengthened; and a hope that medical schools will restore teaching to the central place in the institutional value system it used to enjoy. Ludmerer issues a call for the more vigorous promotion of “an agenda of safety and quality in patient care” (page 312) and suggests that the education of residents be expanded to include venues outside in-patient sites. Elsewhere in the book, he also expresses the expectation that the inclusion into clinical teaching of private patients alongside “ward” patients, more feasible with recent improvements in the re-imbursement of medical care, be routine and maximized to the enjoyment and benefit of all concerned.

View full annotation