LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

The Best Minds

Rosen, Jonathan

Last Updated: Jun-26-2023

Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

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 His parents have been replaced by Nazis, or so he claims.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.

View full annotation

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.

View full annotation

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.

View full annotation

The Pull of the Stars

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: May-02-2023

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.

View full annotation

George and Rue

Clarke, George Elliott

Last Updated: Apr-06-2023

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

George and Rufus (Rue) are born one year apart into grinding poverty of a Nova Scotia community, to a violently abusive father and a frightened well-intentioned mother. They have mixed heritage, part Black, part Mi’kmaq. Battered and hungry, they struggle with learning and abandon school after several attempts at grade three.

George is stolid, strives to be good, serves briefly (and badly) in the military, and is happiest doing heavy physical work for farms, gardens, and woodlots. But he can never hold a job for long. He marries Blondola and they start a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Rue is more dashing, calculating, and slippery. He has a self-taught talent for piano and cultivates an odd form of jazz. He falls in love twice and loses both times--first to an accidental death and next to his own imprisonment. Arrested for theft, he serves two years in prison and, upon his release, barges into George’s marginal existence, contributing nothing and menacing the precarious but loving home.

When Blondola goes into hospital for the birth of her daughter, the doctor refuses to let her leave until his bill is paid. George needs money desperately. Rue convinces him to use a hammer to stun a white man – any white man—and take his money. Together they settle on targeting a taxi driver, but the man who responds to the call is George’s friend. He cannot go through with it, but Rue clobbers the driver, cajoles George into robbing the dying man and dealing with the evidence.

The brutal murder and shockingly clumsy aftermath of their barely disguised deeds results in their arrest. During the police interrogation, George tries to explain his innocence and blames his brother. They are tried within the racially intolerant British-inherited court system that wrongly flatters itself to have avoided American excesses of racism. They are executed on the gallows, hanging side-by-side.

View full annotation

What She Left Behind

Wiseman, Ellen

Last Updated: Jan-03-2023

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Izzy is a teenager who has been in foster care for a decade since the age of 7 when her mother was imprisoned and judged insane for having killed her father. She struggles with a desire to cut herself. Her current foster parents, Harry and Peg, seem kindly and engage Izzy in their task to catalogue artifacts from the nearby state asylum that has recently closed.

Izzy is given the journal of Clara, a patient who, at age 18 in 1929, was pregnant by her Italian lover, Bruno. She was committed to the asylum by her angry father. Clara gave birth, but her baby girl was taken from her. She observed how the brutality of the hospital damaged those who did not belong there, eventually provoking the mental illness it purported to treat. With the help of a gravedigger, Bruno planned an escape, but their plan was uncovered, and Bruno died.

Izzy’s own story unfolds as she works her way through the journal, subjected to bullying and tormented by her anxieties. Peg kindly arranges to take Izzy to see her dying birth mother in prison, where she learns that the murder of her father was to prevent him from abusing young Izzy.

Spoiler alert! Izzy learns from an elderly nurse that the asylum director took Clara’s baby for himself and that Clara is still alive. She reunites the mother and child, who is now a grown woman. Izzy joyfully learns that Peg and Harry will formally adopt her.

View full annotation

Station Eleven

Mandel, Emily

Last Updated: Oct-27-2022

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In the not-too-distant future, Arthur Leander, a famous actor, suddenly collapses and dies on a Toronto stage in the final act of King Lear.. That same night the deadly and highly contagious Georgian Flu reaches North America from Russia. Within days, civilization, as we know it, collapses: no electricity, no gasoline, no water, no travel, no Internet, no information, no medicine, and no escape. A handful of survivors hide in their separate lairs, until their resources are depleted and then they flee on foot, at first alone, stealing and foraging for food, trusting no one, and learning to kill. Surviving. The story takes place in Year 20 after the collapse with frequent visits to the past.

Without realizing it, the protagonists are all connected to Arthur– his ex-wives, young son, best friend, a child actor, the paramedic who tried to resuscitate him at the theatre. Older people remember and mourn the “before time” and its marvels that are lost, perhaps forever. In oppressive heat, a troupe of musicians and actors, called the Traveling Symphony, moves from place-to-place around the Great Lakes, performing music and Shakespeare’s plays because “survival is insufficient.” Usually, they bring pleasure and diversion. But they must take care, as some villages are led by cult-like prophets, intent on control by theft, rape, and murder. Only at the end do they reach Severn City, where a fledging community has created a semblance of peace and respect in an abandoned airport with a museum devoted to all that is lost.

View full annotation

The Way of All Flesh

Parry, Ambrose

Last Updated: Oct-04-2022

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Cancer Confidential: Backstage Dramas in the Radiation Clinic

Hayter, Charles

Last Updated: Aug-23-2022

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.

View full annotation

Wild Boy

Dawson, Jill

Last Updated: Jun-15-2022

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.

View full annotation