Summary:

The author is a practicing neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women in this specialty which numbers about 4,500. She was the first woman to be admitted to her neurosurgery residency program. Her father was a surgeon and she was definitely influenced by him and says that, as the oldest of four children, it was always expected that she would become a doctor; but she didn't decide for sure until partway through her second year of college.

Once in medical school her decision for neurosurgery as her specialty came very easily. Oliver Sacks's writing had a significant influence on her decision. She was also influenced by her college sweetheart who became her husband and who also chose to train as a neurosurgeon. He is not practicing now and they do not have children.

Her description of her long years of training are interestingly related with many individual patient stories and also many descriptions of her teachers and peers. She takes time to describe how she views the specialty itself and its power structure and all that entails. Among the interesting chapters are two about her research years, one at the center for cognitive brain imaging at Carnegie-Mellon and one as a fellow in Epilepsy Surgery. The author was fascinated with the complexity of brain function and its relation to anatomical structure with which she was much more familiar.

Firlik found that she loved "life on the learning curve" and that her curiosity was broad. About her last year as Chief Resident she said "I have had my hand in saving lives and I have had my hand in helping to end them: I'm not talking about murder, of course. I am talking about helping people die" (227). She was able to write this book because she kept a journal during her training.

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The Matisse art work which forms the center for this story is the painting, "Le Silence Habité des Maisons," which shows a parent and child with featureless faces sitting at a table while looking together at a book. This painting is described as the reader is introduced to a family of artists and their unusual housekeeper, Mrs. Brown.

The mother is the design editor of a magazine, A Woman’s Place, and the father is a rigid, relatively unsuccessful painter. There are two children in the family. Mrs. Brown provides the cement to keep the family together and learns from them ways to develop her own unusual kind of art. Interpersonal relationships are fragile and personal needs are great. There is a surprise ending.

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This is the story of the experiences of a middle aged university teacher when visiting her regular beauty salon. A copy of Matisse’s painting, "Rosy Nude" is part of the decor of the salon and is actually what attracts her to the salon in the first place. The main character’s self image and her desire to maintain a natural appearing hairstyle are central to the story.

Her relationship with the owner, who is her personal hair dresser, is also central and the body images of him and others who work in the shop or are customers add interest and color to the story. The conclusion is theatrical and unexpected and points out the many differences in the way we view ourselves and the way in which we are viewed by others.

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This is a story of the interactions of an art student and her assigned mentor, with whom she is at odds, and the interactions of the mentor with a university professor who has been given the task of arbitration between the student and the mentor. The problem for the student and the mentor is that they have totally divergent views of Matisse as a painter of women's bodies.

The mentor sees these paintings as beautiful but they are abhorrent to the student, who has developed an eating disorder as part of her rebellion against the emphasis on female pulchritude. The painting "La Porte Noire" is used to describe the mentor's great admiration for Matisse's amazing use of color.

The university professor brings to the encounter with the mentor her astute understanding of the problem, but also some of her personal issues; this interaction includes a subtle description of the many possible reasons for suicide attempts. The story skillfully describes academic conflict, unhealthy human behaviors, and the importance of skillful arbitration.

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This book is exactly what it claims to be in the title. Dr. Ofri gives us fifteen clinical tales, each of which describes a lesson she has learned from a patient or from her own experience as a patient. It is an extension of her first book, Singular Intimacies: On Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (see this database) and relates to her experiences after she completes residency training at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, to which she eventually returns as a staff physician. Three of the stories are examples of how a physician experiences the patient role, including one in which she relates an early personal experience to that of a patient she cares for ("Common Ground").

Since Ofri served as several locum-tenens, some of the stories take her to rural communities and small towns but most concern experiences with patients at Bellevue in clinics or in the hospital. She also discusses the challenges and limitations of teaching the next generation of doctors at Bellevue ("Terminal Thoughts").

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This play was suggested by the book, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James H. Jones, and by a number of primary sources. It brings to the stage in a fictional way the story of the interaction between an African-American public health nurse assigned to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and four of the African-American participants in the study. Two physicians, one who is head of the Tuskegee Memorial Hospital, and one from the U.S. Public Health Service, are less important characters, but provide the evidence of the government's complicity in the study.

The physical setting of the play is the Possom Hollow Schoolhouse, and there are changing "testimony areas" where a 1972 Senate subcommittee investigation of the Tuskegee study is taking place. The theatrical setting is, however, the conscience and memory of Eunice Evers, the nurse, as she is pulled into and out of the action to give testimony to the audience.

Act One takes place in 1932, and allows the audience to become acquainted with the four African-American men who, along with several hundred others, become part of the study after their blood has been found to test positive for syphilis. The treatment of the infected men with mercury and arsenic comes to an end after six months because of a lack of funds, and a decision is made by the Public Health Service to continue a study of untreated syphilis in these men. A fifty-dollar life insurance policy is given to each man as an inducement to remain in the study.

Act Two carries the lives of the characters through the introduction of Penicillin as treatment for syphilis in 1946--a treatment from which the Tuskegee study patients were excluded--and on to 1972, when the Senate committee hearings were held. The Epilogue is about the big guilts of the government and the little guilts experienced by Miss Evers as she questions her nursing ideals.

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Dr. Alvord was born to a Navajo father and a Caucasian mother--bilagaana--and felt from the beginning that she was walking the path between two worlds. Her childhood was spent on an Indian reservation and she was very close to her Indian grandmother.

She was fortunate to be able to attend Dartmouth College where there is strong support for American Indians. Actually there were 50 other Indian students there when she enrolled. From there she went to Stanford University for medical school and a surgical residency. This was a very unusual path for an Indian woman.

While in medical school and residency she felt very much separated from her Indian heritage and was glad to start her practice of surgery in the Indian Health Service and eventually to return to the Indian Hospital at Gallup, New Mexico, just fifty miles from the reservation where she grew up. This gave her the opportunity to learn more about Indian medicine and how to care for Indian patients.

While there she met her husband, a considerably younger Caucasian, and had her first child after a problem pregnancy. She sought the help of an Indian Medicine Man during this experience and felt much help from him. This is described very vividly.

Just eighteen years after she left Dartmouth she returned to be the Associate Dean for Minority and Student Affairs and to practice surgery and teach part time. There she hopes to share the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life called "Walking in Beauty."

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In the book’s Introduction, Dr. Cleaveland explains his personal need for real and fictional heroes. Seeing himself often as a victim of cruel childhood peers, he sought protectors and savored particularly the exploits of World War II heroes. His heroes, he notes, delivered him safely through childhood and adolescence.

Cleaveland describes seeing a documentary movie about Dr. Croydon Wassel in 1944; Dr. Wassel became his first personal hero. A book about Dr. Wassel was read by Cleaveland many times; later, as an adult, Cleaveland looked for the book again and set out to ascertain its authenticity. From extensive research he found Dr. Wassel to be far more courageous than he had anticipated--"studied, found not wanting."

The author was introduced to the story of Dr. Billie Dyer in 1992 through a collection of short stories. Dyer was a black physician who kept a diary during his eighteen months in service in the U.S. Medical Corp during the First World War. Cleaveland found a copy of the diary in the public library in Lincoln, Illinois and learned more about a new hero.

Other heroes he writes about were Dr. Woodrow Dodson, who served sixty years as a "domestic medical missionary"; and Dr. Lonnie Boaz, a black physician, the son of a victim of a hate crime, who became a well known ophthalmologist, husband, father, civic leader, and reformer after starting out as a painter, janitor, and army medic.

Cleaveland considers some of his patients to be heroes: Vera Gustafson, a World War II nurse whom he interviewed extensively, later adding historical information to her story; Paulette McGill, a childhood diabetic cared for by Dr. Cleaveland for twenty years; and an obese diabetic who became a "universal friend," teaching others about devotion and courage. Other patients were also deemed heroic, each for some special reason.

The longest story, saved till the last, is about Dr. Janusz Korczak, described by Dr. Cleaveland as the most heroic figure he knows of. Korczak was a Polish, Jewish pediatrician who devoted his life to improving the welfare of children in the Warsaw ghetto; he was deported to the Treblinka concentration camp with the children. (A movie that came out in 1990 dramatically tells this story.)

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The first sentence of the introduction indicates the author's intention to talk about "how we do it--and how we could do it". Ending life, she says, is an issue under sustained debate in the United States and in much of the developed world. The argument over physician-assisted suicide is the central framework. The described debates on euthanasia and suicide include two pro and three con arguments in American and international contexts. This collection includes essays, practical notes, historical explorations, policy analyses, fiction, and creative non-fiction written by the author.

The author describes the role of fiction and creative non-fiction as offering a recognition of narrative as a respected form of investigation of social issues. Included are two selections that are in this genre and they are very powerful. The essay on the ethics of self-sacrifice is timely and well written. The author's final conclusion is that Stoic and Christian thinking are still in active collision in much of our consideration of these issues and that this means that advance personal policy making remains in the fullest sense an exercise for each individual.

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This historical novel tells two biographical stories side by side and then brings them together in an unexpected way late in the book. Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer, known especially for his Sherlock Holmes stories. His story starts with his childhood in Edinburgh and his closeness to his mother (Mam). His father is described as a gentle failure of a man.

After an early education by Jesuits in England and Austria Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh University. After graduation he worked as a Locum-tenens, went to sea and eventually started a general practice in Southsea, England. He first became interested in Spiritualism at that time and was also writing stories. Sherlock Holmes provided him with sudden fame and he withdrew from practice, which had not been very successful.

His wife developed tuberculosis and was chronically ill for many years before her death, during which time he met and became emotionally involved with Jean Leckie who became his second wife and shared his belief in Spiritualism.

The second story is about George Edalji, the half-Indian son of a midlands vicar, who became a lawyer and was prey to a series of pranks and false accusations. He was falsely imprisoned and the two men meet when Arthur offered to try to help George seek retribution for this unjust event. Arthur's approach to the problem was "sherlockovian" but also real and at least partially successful. The interaction is fascinating as are the very different life stories of the two men and their families-real family drama.

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