Summary:

This anthology is part of an emerging literature of HIV/AIDS in Africa. It offers individual stories about the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa as a means of countering the mind-numbing statistics on infections and deaths. As the literature of the AIDS crisis in the United States in the 1980s and 90s brought to the general public the subjective experience of HIV/AIDS and thus strengthened the socio-political will to combat the virus, so this emerging literature of AIDS in Africa will deepen awareness about the crisis, engender sympathy for the individuals who suffer from it, and ideally help to shape an effective response to alleviate the devastation being wreaked by this epidemic.

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McCann’s essay is an account of his experience of liver transplantation. It describes his physical and psychic experience of liver failure while waiting on the list for an available organ, his experience in the hospital when the procedure was done, and the aftermath, in which he makes conceptual and emotional adjustments.

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This eight-and-a-half-minute video begins with a woman rocking in front of a window and waving her hands. We hear a woman’s voice singing the sound of “e,” almost without melody. The first half of the video follows this woman’s activities: a shot of her hand rhythmically scraping a looped wire against the surface of a door, repetitively stroking a keyboard, batting at the pull chain for window blinds, and bouncing an orange plastic slinky. The woman rubs her face against the pages of an open book and rocks and listens to the sound of the book’s pages as she flips through them.

Halfway through this short video, text appears: “A Translation.” What follows—in the form of a voiceover and subtitle text—is more than a translation of the autistic woman’s actions just observed. It is a manifesto revealing and protesting the assumptions often made about people with autism and how those assumptions have led to institutionalization and the exclusion of people with autism from the category of persons.

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Julian Schnabel’s film version of Jean-Dominque Bauby’s memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (see annotation), is a re-imagining of the book that offers new approaches to teaching, even while it misses some of the aspects of the book that are so critical to educating medical and nursing students about the experiences of patients. Like Bauby’s book, Schnabel’s movie tells the story of a high-level editor at French Elle who has a stroke and is paralyzed except for the ability to blink one eye and to move his head slightly. Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) awakens from a coma to find himself in a hospital and unable to move or, at least at first, to communicate.

A speech therapist (Marie- Josée Croze) teaches him how to blink in response to letters as she reads through the alphabet, so that letter by letter Bauby can communicate. Friends and family learn this method, and eventually Bauby decides to write a memoir of his experiences using this technique. His publisher finds an amanuensis to transcribe the portions of the book that he first memorizes and then communicates to her painstakingly. The film portrays the process of writing the book, Bauby’s experiences in the hospital with health care professionals, family, and friends, and also some past experiences, such as caring for his aging father and taking a trip with a girlfriend to Lourdes.

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Nurse Lora Hart is working on a private case with two young children who are suffering from malnutrition. They live in a wealthy and chaotic household. Their father is dead, and their mother, who is an alcoholic, and her fortune have fallen into the clutches of her scheming brother-in-law and her thuggish chauffeur, both of whom have been her lovers, among others. The physician caring for the children has been bribed by the children’s uncle, who wants the children to die so that he can marry his sister-in-law and claim her fortune. Nurse Hart secretly defies the physician’s orders and nurses the children back to health. She weathers an attempted rape and a sock on the jaw in the course of her duty at the troubled home. She makes use of her bootlegger boyfriend (this is a Prohibition-era novel) to set up the chauffeur who hit her, and when she learns that the chauffeur has raped her employer’s older daughter, she promises to testify against him in court, even though that results in her being fired from the case and blackballed from hospital work.

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The novel opens with a young surgical nurse, Justine Brent, nursing a mill worker whose arm has been mangled by a carding machine. She soon meets John Amherst, the mill’s assistant manager who works passionately to reform the dangerous conditions at the mill and to improve the living conditions of the workers. Amherst recognizes Justine’s intelligence and sympathy, but he quickly forgets about her when he meets and falls in love with the new mill owner, Bessy Langhope.

The narrative skips ahead three years. John Amherst has learned that his now-wife Bessy has no real interest in his plan to reform the mill, although she initially appeared to be moved by the workers’ misery. In fact, her insistence on luxury, which is funded by the profit from the mills, thwarts his desire to use her controlling interest to make significant changes. The couple encounters Justine, who knew Bessy in school. When the somewhat sickly Bessy invites her to be a private nurse to herself and her stepdaughter, Justine, who is exhausted from “difficult cases,” accepts. Justine attempts to shore up John and Bessy’s increasingly troubled marriage without success. When John is abroad, Bessy has an accident while riding her horse. Paralyzed, in constant pain, and slowly dying, Bessy is attended by a physician who advances his career with the technological feat of keeping Bessy alive, ostensibly until her husband and her father arrive to say their goodbyes. When Bessy begs Justine to let her die, Justine secretly gives her a fatal dose of morphine, an act that the physician suspects.

The narrative skips ahead again to over a year later when Amherst, who has inherited the mills from Bessy, invites her family to celebrate the opening of an emergency hospital he has built in the mill town. Justine, who had stayed on after Bessy’s death as her stepdaughter’s nurse, and Amherst become reacquainted. Their shared social and intellectual interests develop into love, and they marry. The physician who had cared for Bessy and who had, earlier, asked Justine to marry him, had developed an addiction, one that had begun while he was treating Bessy. Beginning to sink into financial ruin, he blackmails Justine. Eventually, Amherst finds out that Justine killed Bessie with morphine and, horrified, rejects her.

Justine confesses her act to Bessy’s father and negotiates a deal: She will remove herself from their lives if he allows Amherst to continue his work at the mills. Bessy’s father accepts the deal, and Justine disappears for many months until Bessy’s daughter becomes ill and begs to be reunited with Justine. A family friend explains to Amherst Justine’s arrangement to protect him and convinces him that she has suffered suitable penance. Justine is reunited with Amherst when he celebrates the opening of a gymnasium for the mill workers, a project he credits Bessy with having designed. Justine, who knows that Bessy had in fact designed the gymnasium for her private estate, a project that would have drained the funds for improving the mills, keeps silent and subverts her knowledge to her husband’s perception of the facts.

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This collection of poems combines mournful reveries of the individual and collective losses of the U.S. AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and '90s with haunting recollections of the losses of childhood. Ghost Letters begins and concludes with poems in which the memories of love and rich relationships interweave with incantations of loss and keen descriptions of caring for the dying. In between is a section of poems that recreate the sweetness and pain of the speaker's childhood and the transformation that his father's death effects on the entire family.

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David Lynch’s The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), a man who we first encounter in the film as “The Elephant Man” of a freak show, whose physical differences are so frightening to the authorities that the exhibit is closed. An ambitious young surgeon, Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), seeks out Merrick (John Hurt) as a subject for a presentation to the Pathological Society and, taken by Merrick’s intelligence and amiability, arranges for Merrick to have a permanent home on the premises of London Hospital. The film portrays Treves as rescuing Merrick from a wretched existence in the squalid wharf district, where he is beaten savagely and otherwise abused by his sideshow manager, Bytes.

Treves provides Merrick with modest bourgeois comfort in the form of private rooms on the hospital premises. When the London Times publishes a letter from the hospital director describing Merrick’s disfigurement as terrifying and requiring isolation, first a famous actress, then most of London high society seek out Merrick, some to befriend him, others to indulge in spectatorship or the fashion of the day. A hospital porter who has access to Merrick’s room brings drunken revelers to view Merrick for a fee, giving the villainous Bytes the opportunity to kidnap Merrick and spirit him off to Belgium and a desperate existence as an abused and degraded sideshow freak.

Eventually, the other members of the freak show free Merrick and send him back to London, where, in a dramatic chase scene, he is pursued by an angry mob until the police arrive. Treves is summoned and reinstalls Merrick in his rooms at the hospital. Merrick is then celebrated by society when he attends his first theater performance. That night, he arranges himself to be able to sleep lying down, like a “normal person,” a position he knows will lead to his asphyxiation due to the size of his head, and he dies.

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This is the first of several autobiographies written by Donna Williams. In this she describes her earliest memories and experiences of being autistic through to her late twenties and the writing of the autobiography itself. Her account begins with descriptions of personality characteristics understood to be typical of people with autism. Contrasting her highly visual nature--a fascination with patterns and color and seen or imagined spots of light--with her difficulty understanding language and formulating it, Williams’s narrative is an account of neurological difference within a family that responded to it with impatience, anger, and violence.

She describes her fear of other people and how she learned to communicate primarily through objects, attaching to things and their symbolic meanings more easily than to people and language. As a means of managing her fear of people and her encounters with sometimes abusive family members and partners, Williams developed alternative personalities. She would perform those different personalities when she wanted to socialize or if she needed to protect herself. Williams develops relationships, some exploitative and some comforting to her, and finds ways to do well in aspects of school and work. The autobiography ends with a discussion of her first draft of the narrative itself providing a means for diagnosis. Initially thinking she has schizophrenia, Williams experiences a revelation when she realizes she is autistic.

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tells the story of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin), a young Korean man who cannot hear or speak, whose sister Han Bo-bae is dangerously ill with kidney disease. Because Ryu and Bo-bae are poor and there is no social system of health coverage in Korea, Bo-bae is not able to receive the transplant she needs to survive. Ryu wants to give his sister one of his own kidneys but he has the wrong blood type. When Ryu is laid off and given a lump sum in severance pay, he seeks out black-market organ transplant. He agrees to give one of his kidneys and ten million won (roughly US $10,000) in exchange for a kidney for his sister. Ryu awakens from anesthesia to find that his kidney has been removed and his money stolen by the black marketeers.

When a kidney becomes available through the hospital, Ryu and his friend Cha-youngmi (Du-na Bae) kidnap the daughter of a wealthy factory owner (Kang-ho Song) in order to raise the money to pay for it. The child dies in an accident and two vengeance plots unfold, that of Ryu punishing the black marketeers and the vengeance that the factory owner wreaks on Ryu and Youngmi for the death of his daughter.

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