LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

The Expendable Man

Hughes, Dorothy

Last Updated: Aug-25-2023

Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

A young man, an intern at UCLA Medical Center, is heading out of Los Angeles on his way to his niece’s wedding in Phoenix. He has signed out for the long weekend and he is eagerly anticipating some time with his family, which will include (though he doesn’t know this yet) his niece’s college roommate, an eligible young woman from a prominent Washington, DC, family, who will be at the wedding also. Driving his mother’s late-model Cadillac, with his suitcase, medical bag, and his father’s golf clubs in the trunk, he is fifteen miles out of Indio and in the middle of nowhere when he spots a teenage girl by the side of the road. She’s a bit disheveled and is carrying a small canvas travel bag and a white plastic handbag and nothing else; she looks to him like the girls his younger sisters refer to as “cheap.” He pulls over and rolls down his window. She is sullen and somewhat evasive in answering questions, and she happens to be going to Phoenix also. Hugh feels that he can’t just leave her here, in the desert, where who knows who she might encounter, so he
offers a ride; he decides, however, that he will drop her off at the next town, where she can catch the bus.

What could possibly go wrong, right?

This is the set-up of Dorothy Hughes’ The Expendable Man, and the answer is, of course, plenty. It is not a big reveal to say that the girl’s motives seem dubious and she proves hard to be rid of, being dropped off and then showing up again, including showing up at Hugh’s Phoenix motel room, where he refuses to speak to her. It is not even a big reveal to say that the morning after she shows up at his motel room her body is found in a canal on the outskirts of Phoenix, and the autopsy reveals her to have been pregnant—and aborted. Nor is it a big reveal—indeed, it is only logical to assume—that the suspicion of the local police falls on Hugh, the last person—and conveniently, a physician—known to have seen her alive. It will be up to Hugh to prove his innocence despite the damning circumstances.

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First Death

Justice, Donald

Last Updated: Aug-20-2023

Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics

Hazzard, Kevin

Last Updated: Aug-02-2023

Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: History of Medicine

Summary:

Before the late 1960s, when someone had a medical emergency, their best hope was a “swoop and scoop” rescue. A police van or a hearse—if one appeared at all—would load up and drive the patient, unattended, unrestrained, to a hospital emergency department. On arrival, there was often little that could be done. In American Sirens, journalist Kevin Hazzard, himself a paramedic, reveals the story of the first fully trained paramedics who practiced life-saving medicine beyond hospital walls. Celebrated in Hazzard’s account are the Black men from the segregated Hill District of Pittsburgh that the visionary physician Peter Safar, inventor of CPR, recruited and trained.

Safar’s 1967 project to train and hire unemployed men from a community organization known as Freedom House was initially met with derision. How, his colleagues asked, could he trust people with a high school education, or less, to endure intensive medical training and perform it flawlessly? The training included fifty instruction hours in anatomy and physiology, more time learning CPR, advanced first aid, defensive driving, and medical ethics. Trainees also learned how to treat cardiac conditions, diabetic emergencies, bleeds, spinal and pelvic fractures, and overdoses. Most controversially, they were taught how to intubate patients. While only 24 participants in Safar’s first class of 44 succeeded, those who did provided evidence that paramedics were fully capable of saving lives. According to Hazzard, Safar’s emergency response project became the national standard.

Hazzard folds the project’s success into the stories of the men—all men at first—who took pride in contributing their life-saving skills to their community. Many of their lives changed direction in the process. Primary among them was John Moon, whose biography and dedication engagingly move the narrative forward. However, Hazzard also recounts how the project’s success met opposition from White residents wary of Black paramedics, a city government reluctant to fund them, and medically untrained police who felt upstaged. The final chapters recount the unravelling of the Freedom House first responders by the mayor of Pittsburgh. By 1975, political forces defunded the Freedom House crews and created a city-sponsored EMS run by the police. Only a few of the Freedom House paramedics chose to join or remain on the city ambulances. Most notably was John Moon, who rose in the ranks, recruited paramedics from low-income neighborhoods, and continues to keep the legacy of Freedom House alive.

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I Have Some Questions for You

Makkai, Rebecca

Last Updated: Jul-24-2023

Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

I Have Some Questions for You begins with the visit of Bodie Kane to Granby, the upscale New Hampshire boarding school that she attended on scholarship far from her home in rural Indiana. Back then she was a sullen out-of-place grungy adolescent, but now she is a successful journalist, famous for producing a podcast about the careers of women in Hollywood. She is a successful alumna and has been invited to teach a mini-course on podcasting during the mid-winter break. The life she leaves behind on the flight from Los Angeles is meta-stable, poised between a divorced husband living comfortably next door (he helps with child rearing) and a mysterious Israeli lawyer with whom she is having an on again-off again affair.

Bodie’s arrival at Granby triggers the resurfacing of complicated and painful memories of her time in high school. She asks each student in her class to make a podcast as a class project. Bodie suggests to one of them that she look into the death of Thalia Keith, who was found drowned in the school pool the night after she appeared in a play performance. Omar Evans, the school’s Black athletic trainer, was arrested and convicted of the murder after minimal investigation by the school or the local police. Thalia, the campus dream girl and object of adolescent desire, had been Bodie’s mismatched roommate the year before the murder. Bodie has deep suspicion about who killed Thalia and why it happened, all centered on a charismatic drama teacher. The predatory shadow of this abusive teacher hovers over the book from start to finish. The story unfolds in the wake of the #MeToo movement. But she is also uneasy about how the judicial system has mishandled Omar’s case and hopes the podcast may unearth new evidence that might cause Omar’s case to be reopened and exonerate him. But nothing in this deeply layered novel proceeds in a straight line. Her divorced husband becomes the subject of a social media attack for presumed sexual misconduct, and Bodie is forced to react. Old friends reveal new secrets. Established history is seen in a new light. What Bodie thought she knew about people is upended. The ending is neat but satisfying. Rebecca Makkai does not just have her finger on the pulse of our time – she is able to bring it fully to life.

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The Best Minds

Rosen, Jonathan

Last Updated: Jun-26-2023

Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

The Best Minds is the true story of the lifelong friendship between the author, Jonathan Rosen, and Michael Laudor. To an extent, as children and young adults, Rosen lives in his brilliant friend’s shadow. While both attend Yale, it is Laudor who graduates summa cum laude in three years. Laudor applies and is admitted to all the top law schools, and, at twenty-four, seems to be destined for great things. Then, a switch flips. His parents have been replaced by Nazis, or so he claims. He roams the house with a kitchen knife. His mother locks herself in the bathroom and calls the police. Rosen gets a call. His friend is in a psychiatric hospital. He has been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia.

After being stabilized on antipsychotics, Laudor is discharged to a halfway house and begins to attend a day hospital. “Painfully aware of where he had been and where he ought to be” (p.243), he is advised to get a job as a cashier at Macy’s. Instead, he makes the extraordinary decision to matriculate at Yale Law School, whose acceptance he has deferred. At school, he wakes up every morning believing his room is on fire, “paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real” (p.277). Incredibly, with the encouragement of the dean and faculty, who “create a day hospital” (p.262) for Laudor and his classmates who read, edit, and type his work, he manages to graduate.

Laudor looks for a job, but determined to be open about his illness, seems unemployable. Nevertheless, he is in a unique position to be a powerful advocate. He is interviewed by the New York Times and is portrayed in glowing terms in a widely circulated article. There are bidding wars among several publishers for a book he is to write. Leonardo DiCaprio expresses interest in playing him in a film. He receives a large advance which obviates the need for employment. For the director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) this is the perfect “opportunity to give the world a positive image of someone with serious mental illness” (p.406).

Unfortunately, Laudor is not compliant with his medication. His personal care and his thought processes deteriorate. However, since he knows how to “avoid the buzzwords that could trip a psychiatric alarm” (p.423) he evades treatment. Eventually he spirals into full-blown psychosis, and convinced his fiancée has been replaced by a wind-up doll, he stabs her to death.

Laudor is considered unfit to stand trial and is committed to a forensic psychiatric facility. His book is never written, and the film director who was to tell his story instead makes A Beautiful Mind, which wins many awards. After years of estrangement, Jonathan Rosen begins to visit his childhood friend again. Laudor remains institutionalized to the present day.

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Tell Her Everything

Waheed, Mirza

Last Updated: Jun-20-2023

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The narrator – a melancholic, retired Indian physician now living in London – rehearses his life story and its secrets that he plans on telling his adult daughter when she visits him from America. Dr. Kaiser Shah (sometimes called “Dr. K”) sent his only child, young Sara to a boarding school in America after her mother, Atiya died of cardiac arrest. Since then, father and daughter have rarely seen one another.

For more than twenty years, Dr. K worked in a hot town in the Middle East yet never got to know or understand its people. His only friend was a troubled hospital anesthetist, Biju. Dr. K was employed by the local hospital and assigned to the Accident and Emergency department. The hospital administrator, Sir Farhad (a man Dr. K feared and revered) was an enigmatic figure of authority. Dr. K was obsessed with accumulating wealth. When Farhad offered him an opportunity to earn extra money, Dr. K had no qualms accepting the new part-time position: punishment-surgeon. He would supervise criminal sentences requiring physical mutilation that were imposed by a judge.

Biju sarcastically told his friend, “You are at the cutting edge of your profession, Dr. K” (111). Yet there was no humor or humanity at presiding over the amputation of the hands of a father-son team of thieves or a maid convicted of stealing jewelry who underwent a similar clinical maiming. The hospital routinely accepted these “punishment cases” referred from the Corrections department and constructed a special operating theatre on the top floor for these “special ops.” Over a decade, Dr. K figured his involvement in this injurious punishment amounted to at least twenty cases.

Raucous Biju gets accused and convicted of stealing drugs from the hospital. His penalty was removal of a hand. Dr. K pleaded on behalf of Biju with the hospital administrator but to no avail. Dr. K was not convinced of Biju’s guilt and would not participate in the amputation of his friend’s hand. Dr. K resigned his post as punishment-surgeon and eventually settled in England with plenty of money for a comfortable albeit lonely life.

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The Netanyahus

Cohen, Joshua

Last Updated: Jun-13-2023

Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Let’s get it out there at the start: this is one wild and crazy book. It is built on a fictionalized account of a meeting that actually took place between the literary critic Harold Bloom and Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the current Prime Minister of Israel. Around this seemingly nondescript event, Joshua Cohen has created an amalgam of at least five simultaneous narratives packed into 237 antic pages.

First, there is the story of the uneasy life of an assimilated Jewish academic, Ruben Blum, the much less illustrious stand-in for Harold Bloom. He is trying to find domestic tranquility and career advancement while teaching in the history department at a small liberal arts school, Corbin College, without completely submerging his Jewish identity.

Then there is the family saga. Ruben’s wife, Edith, is bored in the boondocks. His daughter Judy, who aspires to get admitted to a top tier university (anything but Corbin), is totally focused on getting plastic surgery on her unsatisfactory nose. Blum’s in-laws, who are affiliated but barely practicing Jews, visit the Blums for Rosh Hashana and express their disappointment that Ruben is raising his family so far from the New York City metropolis. Ruben’s parents, who are more observant, visit the Blums for Thanksgiving. The visit deteriorates into the usual family squabbling and miscommunication, and ends on a macabre, comic note. Judy agrees to a day outing with her grandfather but is not ready at the appointed time. Her grandfather knocks on her bedroom door and Judy yells that it is stuck; he then rams the door open with his shoulder and the swinging doorknob smashes right into Judy’s nose, a convenient rhinoplasty (imagine another author who would have the chutzpah to use a classic anti-Semitic trope in such a hilarious way).

Now add a tale of academic intrigue and infighting. Blum’s life becomes complicated when he is asked to chair the search committee that is charged with the decision whether Corbin College should hire Benzion Netanyahu, an unknown Jewish scholar. Blum has to navigate the difficult passage between an objective assessment and satisfying what he thinks the administration wants him to do. Cohen captures the power dynamic of faculty meetings and visiting lectures with all their bombast and jockeying for position.

Next, fold in a robust novel of ideas. Blum reads lengthy letters of recommendation written by Netanyahu’s peers in support of or in opposition to his application for a faculty position. Netanyahu’s lecture outlines his thesis on the origins of antisemitism and the critical turn towards a racial definition that arose in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. Of course, the story of antisemitism cannot be divorced from a dark reading of Jewish history. This is all based on academic work of the real Benzion Netanyahu.

Finally, there is the clashing cultures story as the Netanyahu family deals with the snow and cold winter weather in upstate New York and living in close quarters with Americans who they barely understand. The climax of the book involves an overheated adolescent encounter between Judy and Yonatan Netanyahu, the future Israeli hero who will be killed in the 1976 raid that rescued the hijacked hostages in Entebbe. Benjamin (Bibi), the Israeli Prime Minister, also runs across the pages of this fanciful novel but there is no intimation of what fate has in store for him 60 years in the future.

The Netanyahus is a raucous unpredictable book, one that that in all likelihood will not be comparable to anything you have read before."

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Sawbones Memorial

Ross, Sinclair

Last Updated: May-31-2023

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Dr Hunter’s 75th birthday in April 1948 falls forty years to the day after he started practice in the little prairie town of Upward. He is retiring, moving away to the big city of Saskatoon, and the citizens have gathered to say fare-well. They celebrate in the patient lounge of the new hospital soon to open bearing the name of this long-time servant of all Upward’s needs--physical, mental, social. The doctor has donated his late wife’s piano and the board is already planning to sell it for much-needed cash. It tinkles softly, unwelcome songs are awkwardly sung, coffee and sandwiches served, while the crowd of locals chatters away sotto (and not so sotto) voce, with each other and the doc.

Over the course of the evening, forty years of memories unfold: births, couplings, deaths, desires, hostilities, random acts of kindness and of spite. Folks sidle up to the doc to express thanks for his support and wisdom. The pharmacist wishes he had prescribed more pills. The journalists want him to spill secrets for a feature article in the local rag. The minister engages him in a debate over the existence of God and the meaning of life—both of which the medic denies. Gossips watch, whispering to each other about the doctor’s imagined survival and his dead wife whose alleged frigidity justified his supposed numerous infidelities.

Shopkeeper Sarah’s revisits her embarrassed memories of adolescent attraction, that ripened into adult affection and pleasure that the doctor has long treated her son Dunc with almost fatherly care, taking him and the big but isolated Ukrainian boy, Nick, on house calls. Home from overseas with an English war-bride and now running the store, Dunc presides over the evening, trying to smooth conflicting undercurrents. The gossips speak sweetly to the newcomer bride and behind her back predict the marriage will fail.

It emerges that the incoming young medic will be Nick, once mercilessly bullied as a “hunky kid” by a few shiftless bigots still languishing in Upward. They are convinced that he is returning to extract his revenge. The old doctor defends Nick in his final words and urges his patients to help the young successor. He knows that they can briefly come together in a crisis, but he scolds them for their chronic lack of charity to strangers and to each other.

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Your Hearts, Your Scars

Talve-Goodman, Adina

Last Updated: May-25-2023

Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

This slim volume of essays written by a young woman who had a heart transplant packs a wallop, albeit an understated one. The author, who had a congenital cardiac anomaly that required several surgeries—the first at one day old, another five days later, two more at the ages of two and four years—ultimately developed severe congestive heart failure at sixteen and underwent cardiac transplantation at the age of nineteen (none of this, by the way, is a spoiler; the introduction, written by her sister, lays this out in detail). Eleven years later she developed lymphoma, a side effect of the immunocompromise induced by her anti-rejection medications, and passed away at the age of 32. This book was published posthumously, the essays collated and edited by her sister and her friend and colleague at the literary magazine One Story.

The essays—there are seven of them—deal with life experiences, mostly in the form of encounters with other people, mostly post-transplant. “I Must Have Been that Man,” which won the Bellevue Literary Review’s Non-Fiction Prize, begins with a post-party liaison but centers on the author’s meeting with a man in an upended wheelchair out on the street on a rainy night; “Men Who Love Dying Women and Fishing” speculates about what might attract a man to a woman with a terminal illness; “Your Heart, Your Scars, Zombies” offers a novel take on the idea of a zombie occupying a liminal space between the living and the dead and analogizes that to the situation of the post-transplant patient; “Thank God for the Nights That Go Right” speaks to the serendipity—or Higher Power?—that seems to guide our experiences. They range over the timeline; one recounts a pre-transplant trip with other ill children to San Diego, others come from later in the author’s life. There is no linear temporal progression to the essays; rather, one gets the impression that they are simply being remembered spontaneously. Nonetheless, a clear personal narrative emerges.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick, Stanley

Last Updated: May-17-2023

Bonanni, Luke

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

The film is divided into three parts.

Part I: The Dawn of Man The film opens in the late Pliocene, 3 million years ago, as a tribe of pre-human apes struggles for survival in a harsh wildland. They forage for wild plants, run from predators, and are forced to retreat from their watering hole by an opposing tribe. Returning to their shelter, the apes stumble upon a tall, black monolith, which they cautiously touch. The apes then begin using nearby animal bones as weapons, allowing them to hunt for meat and seek violent retribution against their enemy tribe. Celebrating his victory, an ape stands on his hind legs and tosses his bone weapon into the air. With the weapon soaring into the sky, the film abruptly cuts to a satellite orbiting Earth. The year is now 2001, and scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is traveling via space shuttle to a Moon base that has unearthed a monolith on the lunar surface. As Heywood and his research group gather for a photo in front of the monolith, a shrill, piercing tone fills their radio transmission, and the film cuts to black.

Part II: Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later A team of American scientists aboard the spaceship Discovery One has been sent on a mission to explore Jupiter. The team consists of the pilots, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), three scientists in cryo-stasis, and the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic supercomputer, HAL 9000 (Douglas Rain). HAL runs all onboard operations with mathematical precision but confides in Dave that he is anxious about their mission. HAL predicts that a communication device on the ship’s exterior will fail if it is not urgently repaired. Dave pilots an extravehicular activity (EVA) pod and retrieves the device but finds nothing wrong. HAL maintains that his prediction is correct and suggests the device should be allowed to fail to identify the problem. Mission Control advises that their supercomputer ascertained that HAL has made an error, which HAL denies, stating the only error is human error.

Dave and Frank shut themselves in an EVA pod, outside the range of HAL’s microphones, and decide to shut down HAL if his prediction proves to be untrue. However, HAL’s camera records this surreptitious conversation and he reads the pilots' lips. Frank leaves the Discovery in an EVA pod to reinstall the communication device. HAL hijacks the EVA pod and uses it to remove Frank’s air supply, killing him. Dave sees Frank’s body floating off into space and asks HAL what happened, to which HAL replies he doesn’t know. Dave quickly jumps into another EVA pod, forgetting his helmet. While Dave retrieves Frank’s body outside the Discovery, HAL turns off the life support for the scientists in cryo-hibernation, killing them. HAL then locks the door to the EVA bay, denying Dave entry back onto the Discovery. HAL tells Dave that the plan to deactivate him will compromise the mission.

Dave ejects himself from his EVA pod and manually opens the emergency airlock, miraculously surviving without his helmet. Back aboard the Discovery, Dave disconnects HAL’s circuits, while HAL pleads with Dave to stop. As he ceases to function, HAL reveals that his “mind is going” and that he is “afraid.” Dave is shaken by “killing” HAL. With HAL offline, a recording from Heywood automatically begins playing, revealing that the true purpose of the Jupiter mission is to investigate a signal that the lunar monolith sent to Jupiter.

Part III: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite Dave, now the lone surviving member of Discovery One, arrives in Jupiter’s orbit. He encounters a massive monolith orbiting the planet. As Dave approaches the monolith in an EVA pod, he enters a tunnel of intense flashing colors. He awakens in a neoclassical apartment. He then experiences a strange aging phenomenon, which ends with him as an old man lying in bed. He sees the monolith at the foot of the bed and reaches for it. The film ends with Dave transformed into a fetus suspended in a ball of light, orbiting Earth.

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