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Night Rounds

Tursten, Helene

Last Updated: Aug-22-2013
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Police inspector Irene Huss, married to an inspired chef and mother of twin teenaged girls, is summoned to investigate the murder by strangulation of a nurse who had been working the night shift in a private hospital. A power failure that same night provokes the death of a patient when his respirator failed. The nurse’s body is found tossed over a generator in the basement electrical room—one of the first places inspected. The lines had been deliberately cut.

Another nurse is missing. The only other nurse on duty that night is convinced that she has seen the hospital’s old ghost, Nurse Tekla, who hanged herself in the hospital attic because of a broken heart a half century earlier.

The hospital director, handsome but administratively challenged Dr. Löwander, is devastated. He worries about the possible failure of the hospital, which he inherited from his father and he seems genuinely concerned for his staff. His ex-wife remains bitter about her divorce years ago, but his present wife – an obsessive body builder and trainer—seems unconcerned by the events. She has long been planning to turn the hospital into a spa and gym. The dead patient’s beautiful, youngish widow has just come into a lot of money with her husband’s death by power failure.

The investigation leads to the history of the hospital, old affairs, and the origins of the ghost-nurse story, which attaches itself to popular opinions about the case to the immense irritation of the police chief. 

Meanwhile, one of Huss's daughters has become a militant vegan, resulting in more stressors in her double life as a wife and a cop.  

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Annotated by:
Willms, Janice

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

The writer opens the volume by discussing the ways in which the poetry created by the affected person differs from the narrative form of describing the experience of illness—the classic “pathography.”  The essays in the collection demonstrate, by using examples, some of the unique qualities of the poem as an alternative to a prose narrative progression as well as the ambiguities introduced by the language of poetry. The discussions of the poetry presented provide the reader with guidance to the acceptance of poems in their “own terms” in order to understand the poet’s internal sense of the meaning of illness.  By allowing new and different information to become available for consideration the careful reader may gain new insights into the lives of those who are ill or disabled.

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The Gift

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: Aug-22-2013
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

In 1877, the widowed Sarah Bell writes to the New York Children’s Aid Society to explain that poverty has driven her to leave her daughter Lily May in its care. Mr Bassett writes to the same office that he and his wife would like to adopt a little girl. They are given Lily May and change the baby’s name to Mabel.

Over the years, Sarah keeps writing to ask for news of her child; when she remarries she begs to have her daughter back. With evident alarm, the Bassetts tell of the good care they have given the girl; they love her and will not relinquish her. Lily/Mabel has no idea that she is adopted and will never be told.

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Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Treatise

Summary:

Each chapter in this book explores the forms and effects of humor in healthcare, mostly in hospital settings, beginning with a touching account of a person who worked as a hospital clown, visiting patients, enlivening staff, haunting the halls of a hospital where she became a beloved and important reminder that the disruptions of illness can be reframed in ways that make them more tolerable and bring patients back into communities from which they often feel exiled.  In subsequent chapters Carter, who himself went through cancer treatment, and writes from that experience as well as from his experience as a volunteer in an ER, draws from his compendious collection of medical jokes and stories to provide examples of the kinds of humor that help nurses and doctors, as well as patients and their families, get through the days.  Some of it is edgy and ironic, some broad and slapstick, some wordplay that helps to domesticate the often alienating discourse of clinical medicine.  His point is to provide some analytical categories and ways of understanding the kinds of humor that can be helpful-not simply to share a collection of jokes and stories, but the book does, especially in the final chapters, provide a sizeable collection of those, ranging from puns (including what he calls "groaners") to patient stories that in various ways turn medicine on its head.

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Summary:

The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) conducted an affair with her doctor, gynecologist Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918) in the decade before he married. They remained friends, and she always called him her Docteur Dieu (doctor god).

The handsome physician was a leading light in French gynecology and in the Paris arts community. Clad in his red dressing gown, Pozzi was the subject of John Singer Sargent's wonderful portrait (1881), which spawned erotic legends about him.

At first happy, Pozzi’s marriage degenerated into coldness, but his wife would not grant him a divorce. He then established a long-standing, public relationship with Emma Fischhof. During the Dreyfus affair, which unmasked the horror of entrenched anti-Semitism in France, physician and actress both fought against the ill treatment of the Jewish officer.

In 1915 and at Sarah’s insistence, Pozzi amputated her painful leg. Three years later, he was shot and killed by a disgruntled and delusional patient who blamed him for a minor illness.

 

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

The author was the first blind physician to be licensed in Canada. Her autobiography is also an autopathography.

From her anger over developing severe diabetes as a teenager, through her relentless pursuit of a scientific degree and medical school, through a brief failed marriage – followed by the tragedy of completely losing her sight while still in training, to a rewarding and responsible career as a palliative care physician and educator.

Sustained by her religious faith and by loyal family members and friends, Poulson explains choices, compromises and supports that allowed her to continue studying and working in Montreal and later in Toronto.

Her complications from diabetes were numerous, and included heart disease for which she required surgery. Then she developed breast cancer, which eventually metastasized. In closing her narrative, she knows it will likely take her life.

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

In 1904, the 19 year-old Russian Jewish Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is admitted to Burgholzi clinic under the care of Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who is beginning to adopt the talk-therapy methods of psychoanalysis promoted by Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). 

She is hysterical and difficult to control, but she is also bright and has been studying to become a doctor. Jung slowly breaks through her resistence using dream interpretation and word association; eventually she reveals that her mental distress has its origin in her relationship with her father. He would punish her physically and she found it sexually exciting. 

The married Jung is obsessed with his patient and seduces her. They conduct a heated affair that entails sessions of bondage and beating, that they pursue almost like a scientific experiment.

On this background, Jung is becoming the protégé and anticipated heir of Freud—but they disagree over whether or not psychotherapy can cure. Spielrein recovers and goes on to become a physician and psychiatrist who develops her own methods of therapy. Freud comes to admire her and Jung is torn by jealousy. 

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The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

Aira, Cesar

Last Updated: Jun-30-2013
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novella

Summary:

The protagonist-physician, Dr. Aira, is an almost 50-year-old sleepwalker who resides in Buenos Aires. He's nearsighted, introspective, and paranoid. Dr. Aira's fame stems from his "miracle cures" - even though it's not clear that he's ever actually performed one. Dr. Aira does not believe in God.

His initial encounter with "paranormal medicine" occurred during childhood when dog owners in his town were led to believe that by submitting themselves to a lengthy set of penicillin injections their pets would be painlessly neutered. Acknowledging the absurdity of that situation, he remained intrigued by the "possibility of action from a distance" (p10) and the lure of magical healing.

Dr. Aira's nemesis is Dr. Actyn, Chief of Medicine who tries to ridicule Dr. Aira and debunk his claims. Dr. Actyn sets elaborate traps including one with a "dying" actor on an ambulance who Dr. Aira refuses to cure.

Dr. Aira obtains enough money to devote 10 months solely to writing his secrets and eventually self-publishing his knowledge in the form of pamphlets. His plan is interrupted by an urgent request to perform a miracle cure on a terminally-ill cancer patient. He consents and makes a house call to treat the wealthy man. After one hour of intense deliberation and theorizing, Dr. Aira's work is complete. Laughter erupts. The "patient" is a fake. It's his archenemy Dr. Actyn in disguise. Dr. Aira's failure is captured on camera.

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My Heart

Mehmedinovic, Semezdin

Last Updated: Jun-27-2013
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A 50-year-old man is showering when he experiences pressure in his chest and throat associated with profound fatigue. An ambulance is called, and the emergency medical personnel inform him that he is having a heart attack. As he lays bare on his bed, his emotions switch from shock to indifference to a sense of calm with acceptance of impending death.

The narrator is a poet and a foreigner. In the hospital, his complicated name gets truncated to "Me'med" for convenience. He emigrated with his family from Zagreb to America in 1996, but still wakes from sleep haunted by memories of Kalashnikovs firing in Sarajevo.

He has stents placed in two obstructed coronary arteries and is immediately asymptomatic. At the Washington, D.C. hospital where he is treated, the narrator encounters a collection of fellow-foreigners: an elderly Slovak roommate suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a young Somali nurse, an African echocardiographer, and an Indian physician. A few days later, when he is discharged from the hospital, he feels fear and insecurity even though his medical problem has been fixed.

The narrator's world is now different. He is no longer who he was. When he returns to his apartment, hints (cigarettes and ashtrays) of his prior life are missing. He has a chance to change, another opportunity to restart his life.

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Talking with Dolores

O'Connor, Dee

Last Updated: Jun-24-2013
Annotated by:
Bertman, Sandra

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

Centered on an 85 year-old widower named Mo, the play brings to life many of the issues around end-of-life choices. Mo talks with his late wife, Dolores, through her picture and lets her know of his plans to come back to her. but his plans are interrupted--first by a neighbor and later by his nephew. Each interaction illuminates some aspect of the issues facing Mo: risk factors (loss of his spouse, other friends, work); warning signs (insomnia, giving things away) and protective factors (strong relationship with his nephew). The play shines a light on these themes while always keeping the characters honest and real. Yet the play isn't morbid. The audience frequently shifts from tears to laughter as the play weaves in light moments. In one particularly funny scene, Mo's best friend appears handing out condoms and promoting "Safe Sex 'till Rigor Mortis."

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