Showing 1 - 10 of 513 annotations tagged with the keyword "Art of Medicine"

Sawbones Memorial

Ross, Sinclair

Last Updated: May-31-2023
Annotated by:
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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The Pull of the Stars

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: May-02-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

It is Dublin in late autumn 1918, the waning days of World War I, and nurse-midwife Julia Power is suddenly thrust into the task of managing a small ward of heavily pregnant women who have contracted the deadly influenza. Having survived influenza herself, she does not fear infection, but she worries about her lack of experience. She also worries about her shell-shocked brother with whom she shares a home. 

Two people appear to help: the intelligent but uneducated young volunteer Bridie Sweeney raised in an institution; and the legendary woman doctor Kathleen Lynn –who quietly reveals her competence and skill, even as authorities are lurking to arrest her.  

Over the course of just a few days, they encounter recalcitrant mothers, complicated deliveries, battered wives, stillbirths, and deaths. Influenza adds special dangers to the natural event, but some patients survive their ordeal. 

Although Bridie was to help for just one day, she learns quickly and returns. Julia is impressed by her diligence and drawn ever closer to her kindness and earthy wisdom. They pass a night together sharing confidences, and Julia begins to understand the physical and emotional mistreatment that Bridie suffered in the care of nuns. Their embrace awakens in Julia a yearning she had never imagined. But only hours later Bridie falls ill and succumbs rapidly to the deadly infection.

When an unwed mother suddenly dies after giving birth to a deformed child, Julia is horrified that the baby must be placed in an institution. Instead, she takes the baby home to an uncertain future but sparing the child the same horrors that Bridie once suffered. 

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Bookends: A Family Doctor Explores Birth, Death, and Tokothanatology

Boron, Susan

Last Updated: Dec-06-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Through ten short chapters, family doctor Susan Boron explains the origin of her neologism, “tokothanatology,” the study of common practices that surround both birth and death, events that “bookend” our existence. Daughter of an obstetrician who pioneered family-centered birth and spouse of a man who worked in palliative care, Boron noticed the tremendous similarities in the gestures, rituals, and obligations of dealing with both the beginning and the end of life. The obligations extend to the loved ones in the sphere of patients in care--a practice, she writes, “from pre-cradle to post-grave.” 

One chapter reviews the rituals emerging from many different cultures and religions; another examines portrayals of birthing and dying in image and word; yet another addresses the impact of sudden and unanticipated outcomes. Ethical and legal dilemmas and the contingencies imposed by time and place are discussed frankly.  

Recognizing the advantages of medical technologies, she is nevertheless skeptical of their utility in every case and includes practical advice for dealing with pain, showing that midwifery techniques could enhance palliation. Throughout, she acknowledges that things have changed, are changing, and will change again. Sources are referenced in footnotes. 

In the end, the repeated message is one we’ve heard many times before, offered in a refreshing way: the importance of empathy and of listening to the patient's wishes in birthing and in dying. 

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Rx/Museum: 52 Essays on Art and Reflection in Medicine

Levy, Aaron; Hoy, Lyndsay

Last Updated: Sep-12-2022
Annotated by:
Lam, MD, Gretl

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

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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Cancer Confidential: Backstage Dramas in the Radiation Clinic

Hayter, Charles

Last Updated: Aug-23-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

All the [medical] world’s a stage! In elegant prose, with Felliniesque flights into whimsical metaphor, physician-historian-playwright Charles Hayter describes his encounters with cancer, as a doctor and as a son, and how the experience changed him as a person. 

Just as he finishes his residency training as a cancer specialist, his stoic physician father develops cancer. The story of that family illness is interwoven with vivid case histories of patients, recounted personally rather than clinically. These patients display many of the characteristic reactions and behaviors of his own father. 

Several other themes are prominent: the losing battle against death – or rather Death--who is a character lurking in the corners of the consultation rooms; the tensions of a son trying to please his difficult parents with advice and understanding that they seem not to want; the bravery of a gay man coming out to his wife and children to find a new place in the world.  

These struggles are placed on a background of the nebulous status of radiation therapy, a maligned and misunderstood specialty.

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Wild Boy

Dawson, Jill

Last Updated: Jun-15-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Young doctor Jean-Marc Itard is serving in the Paris home for deaf-mute children. When a “wild boy” without speech is found near a village in Aveyron, France, Itard accepts the challenge of educating him. Many senior colleagues, including Philippe Pinel, opine that it will be impossible, even when Itard determines that the boy is not deaf. The lad, now named Victor, seems to be about ten years old, but his small size owing to malnutrition may be deceptive; he quickly reaches puberty. Helped by the care and empathy of the home’s housekeeper, Madame Guérin, and Julie, her daughter, Victor learns to perform several domestic tasks but manages to speak only a few words.

 His situation is a mystery. Caregivers marvel at how he had been able to survive alone in the woods for several years. They wonder if he ran away from an abusive home, or if he was deliberately abandoned because of his disability. A crisis emerges when a woman appears claiming to be his relative. Itard eventually abandons the effort to educate Victor, but he is allowed to continue living with the Guérins.

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A Matter of Death and Life

Yalom, Irvin; Yalom, Marilyn

Last Updated: Jun-02-2022
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

After 65 years of marriage, two life-partners face the prospect of final separation, as one of them develops multiple myeloma. This is the crisis that led Irvin Yalom, eminent psychiatrist, novelist, and pioneer of existential psychotherapy, and his wife Marilyn, acclaimed feminist author and historian, to collaborate in writing the story of their journey through Marilyn’s final months of life. In the resulting book, Irvin and Marilyn write alternating chapters until Marilyn becomes unable to write. After her death, Irvin continues with the story of his bereavement.  

Marilyn’s chapters include reflections on love and illness, ranging from Emily Dickinson and Henry James to Paul the Apostle. She frequently expresses her gratitude: “I can still talk, read, and answer my emails. I am surrounded by loving people in a comfortable and attractive home.” (p. 20) Most of all, she is thankful for her husband, “the most loving of caretakers.” (p. 15) Yet, as her disease progresses, she comes “to the understanding that I would never be the same again—that I would pass through days of unspeakable misery while my body would decline and weaken.” (p. 76) She decides to pursue the option of physician-assisted suicide, which is legal in California, when her suffering becomes overwhelming.  

In his chapters, Irvin resists this decision, maintaining hope for additional “good” life, despite all evidence to the contrary. Near the end, Marilyn’s pain and other symptoms become so severe that she cries out, “It’s time, Irv. It’s time. No more, please. No more.” (p. 139) Her physician arrives, confirms her intention, and surrounded by her whole family, Marilyn sucks the liquid through a straw and quietly passes away.

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Mysterious Medicine: The Doctor-Scientist Tales of Hawthorne and Poe

Poe, Edgar Allan; Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Last Updated: Jan-25-2022
Annotated by:
Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Anthology (Short Stories)

Summary:

Mysterious Medicine:  The Doctor-Scientist Tales of Hawthorne and Poe is one in a series of books called Literature and Medicine dedicated to the exploration and explication of the intersection of the two titled disciplines.  This volume, edited by L. Kerr Dunn, looks at the short stories (mostly—it includes one sonnet) of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe from the viewpoint of each author’s use of, and in some cases experiences with, doctors, diseases, and the medical profession.  The volume begins with an Introduction that situates the writings within the medical and social milieu of the period (the authors were contemporaneous) and illustrates the way in which the tales reflect the times.

The stories are grouped by author and arranged chronologically.  Among the nineteen entries included are “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” “The Birthmark,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” for Hawthorne, and “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” and “Some Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” for Poe; each entry is preceded by a brief introduction and followed by discussion questions.  An extensive list of scholarly references closes out the volume. 

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Imprimatur

Monaldi, Rita; Sorti, Francesco

Last Updated: Nov-03-2021
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In a future 2040, the church is considering the canonization of Pope Innocent XI. An unusual seventeenth-century manuscript is brought to the attention of the authorities and the bulk of the novel is its transcription in full.  

The manuscript is the diary of an intelligent, but inexperienced young orphan-apprentice who is working in a Roman hostel in September 1683. The Catholic Church is fighting the Ottoman Turks who have besieged Vienna. Tensions with France are high as that country and its king have long asserted their exemption from Church rule.

 A hostel guest dies, and the authorities, suspecting plague, impose a quarantine. The apprentice falls under the influence of another confined guest, Atto Melani, a famous castrato and spy for King Louis XIV of France. Believing that the deceased guest was murdered, they venture out each night into subterranean Rome searching for clues to support their theory and leading them to investigate poisons, panaceas, and political plots. Meanwhile, a physician also confined to the hostel attempts all remedies to prevent plague, while another guest, besotted with astrology, strives to reveal the future, and yet another plays soothing music. 

Like a baroque Agatha Christie novel, plausible suspicion is cast upon every guest until the truth emerges and with it many doubts about the saintliness of Pope Innocent XI. The 2040 writer invites the Holy Office to consider the implications of the manuscript before proceeding with the canonization.

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Oli Otya? Life and Loss in Rural Uganda

Bruell, Lucy

Last Updated: Oct-27-2021
Annotated by:
Field, Steven

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Most of us are aware that the discipline of Palliative Care, with its focus on excellent pain management, other comfort measures, and psychosocial and spiritual counseling, has made a dramatic difference in the way patients are treated near or at the end of life.   However, for most of us, knowledge of Palliative Care is usually limited to how it functions in so-called “first world” countries.  What is Palliative Care like in areas around the world that have less-effective systems of health care delivery? 

Lucy Bruell’s documentary, Oli Otya:  Life and Loss in Rural Uganda, aims to tell this story.  Bruell, an award-winning documentarian (and coincidentally—and full disclosure—the Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database), follows a husband-and-wife team, an internist and a palliative care specialist, who travel each year to Uganda to volunteer with a small palliative care service based in a rural hospital.  Along with the team nurse, nursing assistant, and spiritual counselor, and a medical student who has accompanied them for this trip, they see patients in the hospital, the clinic, and most of the time, in the patients’ homes, often covering many miles in a day in this rural area of the country. 

It is the stories of these patients that constitute the heart of the film.  A woman who has been catastrophically burned in a revenge crime, a man with metastatic cancer who can no longer walk, a woman with end-stage rheumatic heart disease who insists on gifting the team with a live chicken for their work, a young man with a progressive neurodegenerative disease whose mother ascribes his behavior to demons—we meet these and other patients as the team makes its rounds, interacts with villagers and herbalists, and fights to overcome shortages of critical medicines.

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