Showing 1 - 10 of 43 annotations in the genre "Collection (Essays)"

Summary:

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, edited by Shelton Rubenfeld and Daniel Sulmasy, is an unusual collection of scholarly essays in that it combines essays about Nazi euthanasia with others that deal with contemporary PAD (Physician Aid in Dying) and questions whether there might be a relationship between the two. This perspective is understandable, given the book’s origin. The Center for Medicine after the Holocaust, an organization with the mission “to challenge doctors, nurses, and bioethicists to personally confront the medical ethics of the Holocaust and to apply that knowledge to contemporary practice and research,” invited a group of North American and Israeli palliative care specialists and medical ethicists in 2018 to visit German sites associated with Third Reich euthanasia programs.  The intensive discussions that followed resulted in this provocative collection of papers.  

Dr. Timothy Quill is among the writers supporting the moral probity and legalization of PAD, while Drs. Diane Meier and Daniel Sulmasy present strong arguments against the practice.

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Summary:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of curators and clinicians from the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Slought Foundation, and Penn Medicine started the Rx/Museum project with the goal of creating an online medical humanities experience to support healthcare providers. The project championed the role of art in the training and wellbeing of clinicians, and aimed to foster connection, reflection, and humanistic learning during a time of immense trauma and isolation. Rx/Museum began as a series of essays that were originally emailed on a weekly basis from July 2020 to June 2021. These 52 essays were later published together in a book.

The Rx/Museum book features a foreword and afterword by the editors describing the philosophy of the project and explaining the importance of art in medical education, along with the 52 essays published in chronological order. Each essay focuses on an individual artwork including paintings, photographs, and film stills. The essays are structured in a uniform manner, starting with a thematic quote, followed by a description of the artwork that provides an historical context and highlights visual features, then a print of the artwork, and finally a series of reflections which connect the artwork with issues in healthcare.

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How To Be Depressed

Scialabba, George

Last Updated: Nov-28-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

How To Be Depressed  is a book with a most unusual structure.  It is introduced by an essay entitled “Intake” that was previously published in a literary magazine.  The bulk of the book, “Documentia,” is taken up by an edited selection of the author’s psychiatric records from 1969 to 2016. It is rounded out by an interview with the author and by his “Tips for the Depressed.”   

Author George Scialabba ascribes his “exceptionally flimsy…shock absorbers” to his “constantly worried” parents (p.3).  While studying at Harvard he becomes involved with a strict religious organization. After leaving that group he undergoes a crisis of faith and his first episode of depression. Paralyzed by self-doubt, he drops out of graduate school and begins a cycle of clerical jobs that are beneath his intellectual capability. After many years he gradually wins distinction as a freelance essayist.  However, due to his incapacitating symptoms he never has a steady writing job and has difficulty attaining financial security.  

In his introduction, Scialabba tells us that “the pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.  To escape it, I would do anything” (p.1).  As attested to by the notes of his well-meaning psychiatrists and psychotherapists, he has diligently applied himself to a wide variety of treatments.  Sadly, if anything he gets worse over time, and eventually requires electroconvulsive therapy. 

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The Empathy Exams

Jamison, Leslie

Last Updated: Aug-02-2021
Annotated by:
Zander, Devon

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

Leslie Jamison starts The Empathy Exams with a quote from The Self-Tormentor by Terence, first in Latin, then in English: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”  In beginning this way, she sets up the book to explore the human condition and what it means to relate to one another with caring despite the interpersonal complications that can often arise. Through a series of nonfiction essays (some initially published elsewhere) she explores how we express our feelings and process those of others. To do this, Jamison uses a number of different lenses, large and small, including ultramarathons, immigration, incarceration, a Morgellons disease conference, and more.  

The book takes its name from the first essay in which Jamison juxtaposes her experience as a standardized patient for students in medical school with being an actual patient. She specifically explores the ways in which empathy is created/manufactured and extended in medicine, both from medical professionals and loved ones.

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Summary:

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Koven contemplates some unique challenges confronting female physicians: discrimination, sexism, lower annual salary on average than male counterparts, possible pregnancy and motherhood. She recalls her medical school and residency experience, describes her internal medicine practice, and highlights her role as a daughter, spouse, and mother.

Worry is a theme that works its way into many phases of Koven's life and chapters of this book. The opening one, "Letter to a Young Female Physician," introduces self-doubt and concerns of inadequacy regarding her clinical competence. "Imposter syndrome" is the term she assigns to this fear of fraudulence (that she is pretending to be a genuine, qualified doctor). She worries about her elderly parents, her children, patients, and herself. Over time, she learns to cope with the insecurity that plagues both her professional and personal life.

Some of these essays are especially emotional. "We Have a Body" dwells on the difficult subject of dying, spotlighting a 27-year-old woman who is 27 weeks pregnant and diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lung. "Mom at Bedside, Appears Calm" chronicles the author's terror when her young son experiences grand mal seizures and undergoes multiple brain surgeries for the tumor causing them.

Listening emerges as the most important part of a doctor's job. Koven encourages all doctors to utilize their "own personal armamentarium" which might include gentleness, exemplary communication skills, a light sense of humor, or unwavering patience. She fully endorses a concept articulated by another physician-writer, Gavin Francis: "Medicine is an alliance of science and kindness" (p228).

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Annotated by:
Willms, Janice

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

According to the editor’s introduction, this collection is based on the AMSA (American Medical Student Association) assertion that the physician must be a humanist, a communicator and an advocate as well as a scientist.  To support these and related commitments, it offers essays that demonstrate how and under what circumstances the introduction of creative arts into the lives of professional care providers and their patients and families may be achieved.  Included in some essays are general themes, while in others there are very detailed descriptions of methodology. Others utilize more standard research designs and outcomes.

What creative arts are included in the discussions?  Visual arts, drama, music, and story-telling stand out in terms of potential and, in some cases, already demonstrated applicability to a medical practice.  Some of the essays propose art forms that can be translated into a useful frame for health practitioners, artists and/or patients and their families.

Some essays include assessment of research projects or various designs of methodologies for using creative art in the medial professional education environment.  Others rely on personal experiences using the arts in the learning and teaching of skills such as communication with peers, patients, family and friends.

The volume is divided into four sections.  The first cluster of essays considers using the arts to illustrate empathy in encounters among providers and recipients of health care services.  This is demonstrated in a variety of settings as disparate as end-of-life situations and dental training programs.

The second section includes examples of drama, music and drawing as part of caring for caregivers.  Through group settings and peer support, art serves as a stress reducer for those whose work involves the highly emotional situations health professionals often encounter.

Section three explains and demonstrates the narrative reflective process, in which experiences and stories are shared among those persons involved as patients, family members and caregivers.  The special situation of interviews in pediatrics is given attention in one portion of this section.

The final section addresses the question of using art to explore troublesome issues that demand change or special attention.  Included are ethical dilemmas and the need for health professions to build bridges to the community at large.

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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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Summary:

Jerome Lowenstein is a nephrologist, author, and founder of the Bellevue Literary Press and the Humanistic Aspects of Medicine Education seminar program at the NYU School of Medicine.  In this thoughtful and illuminating book of essays he explores the patient/physician relationship in a world where medicine has embraced technology and scientific advances in the laboratory at the risk of neglecting the humanistic underpinnings of the field.

Dr. Lowenstein graduated from medical school at NYU in the late 1950s and spent nearly his entire professional career at NYU Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital. When he was a resident, long before work hour limits were instituted, the house staff gathered in the cafeteria at midnight to dine on the days’ leftovers.  This communal meal “provided a fine opportunity to communicate with colleagues directly, rather than by beeper and phone, about many of the days ‘medical leftovers,’ ” (1) sharing information as well as the frustrations and rewards of caring for patients.  “The Midnight Meal” poses the challenge of retaining the core of relationships, both between patient and physician and among colleagues in the rapidly changing world of medicine today.

In the essay, “Can You Teach Compassion,” Dr. Lowenstein tells his readers about the student who responded to the question with “I don’t know if you can teach compassion, but you surely can teach the opposite.” (13) The student was referring to how students become “desensitized” during their clinical years to the suffering of their patients, sometimes to the point of using derogatory terms to describe them. Dr. Lowenstein argues that teaching attendings can and should encourage students to learn about their patients. He writes how he once interrupted an intern who began to present a case by stating: “This is the first hospital admission of this thirty-five year old IVDA.”  Dr. Lowenstein asks: “Would our thinking or care be different if you began your history by telling us that this is a thirty-five-year-old Marine veteran who has been addicted to drugs since he served with valor, in Vietnam?” (17) Learning about the lives of their patients, Lowenstein emphasizes, does not detract from the clinical picture, but rather enhances it.  

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Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

Perillo's essays offer a lively, variegated view from the wheelchair of a woman with multiple sclerosis who is also a naturalist, an outdoorswoman, a wife, and an award-winning writer.  Not all of them focus on her condition, though observations about living with the disease occur in most, and are thematic to some.  Most are also laced with wry humor.  One comes to see in these sketches from the Pacific Northwest how full and rich a life it is possible to live while also fully acknowledging and even lamenting the loss of mobility.  She invokes Thoreau several times, and her work may be easily situated in his tradition of personal, reflective essays on the natural world.  For her, the natural world extends to the world of the body, linked as it is with the bodies of all living things.

            

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Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

Cortney Davis follows her 30 year career in nursing, from her experience as a student nurse washing a patient's feet, to dealing as a nurse practitioner with life and death issues in an inner city OB/GYN clinic. Her essays present epiphanies where she realizes what is important in a confusing and ambiguous situation, why she writes poetry even though she is exhausted from her daily work in the clinic, why she is a nurse when the job  sometimes seems overpowering and depressing.  The positive connections with patients--through kindness, caring, truth-telling, touch-outweigh the difficulties.  Tedious routines are often transformed by spiritual insights and empathy. And sometimes what seems like a miracle inserts itself in a time of grief. Whether she is talking to a man in a coma or treating a sexually-abused teenager, her focus is on the care of the patient.

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