Summary:

Ninety year old Hagar Shipley is as proud, independent, and clever as when she was a young girl growing up through the Depression and afterwards in a prairie town in Manitoba. Now in Vancouver, she suffers from arthritis, memory loss, incontinence and abdominal pain that make it impossible for her to be cared at home by her eldest son Marvin, aged 64 and his wife Doris.

She is ill and fearful but shares none of this with anyone. Unwilling to leave her house and move to a nursing home, Hagar slips away to a cottage she remembers from summers ago, and secretly find her way back to it.

On this journey, her present life continually blurs with remembrances from her past, as a self-assured "peacock" daughter of Jason Currie, a tough, disapproving Scottish Protestant store owner who values propriety, refinement and friends of social standing. Hagar defies her father by marrying Bram Shipley, an unsuccessful farmer with coarse manners. Their stormy marriage produces two sons, Marvin and John, whom she dominates. The harsh frontier life in the 1930s and the couple's incompatibilities cause her to leave her husband and go to Vancouver. Consistently Hagar's fierce independence and pride prevent her from expressing emotion or accepting weaknesses in her family, and in herself.

Eventually she is found by her son Marvin. By then she has become ill and disoriented, and is hospitalized. She is dying and must come to terms with her past and her present life and accept the death that is her future.

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As the two physician-authors suggest, this book is kind of a primer for medical educators who plan to integrate medial humanities materials and approaches into curricula for healthcare providers and trainees. It is a "how-to" manual for teaching medical humanities content to clinicians.

The book's Introduction asks "why use the arts In medical education?" and identifies their utility in understanding the patient's unique and personal experience of illness, and the effects of  patients' social locations and psychological responses to their disease and to the healthcare professionals who care for them. And further, the arts offer a way for healthcare professionals to explore and reflect emotionally on their personal interactions with patients, to think creatively and practice empathetically.

The next chapter provides a model of "how to teach the arts" using a non-didactic, interactive approach as a series of questions around the work of art. Illustrative examples are included at each step. In the subsequent chapters, each focuses on an individual art forms-- literature, visual art, sculpture, photographs, music and drama-- with specific examples, exercises and activities for learners that have been piloted by the authors. For the music chapter, a CD with examples is included.

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Walt Koontz (Robert De Niro) is a retired security officer, cited for his heroism, and now living alone in an unsavory apartment building on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He regards his neighbors with contempt, especially the "faggot" upstairs, Busty Rusty, (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a transvestite and singer/piano player at a popular drag club. During a drug-related shoot-out with an upstairs neighbor, Walt attempts to help, but suffers a stroke that leaves him with paralysis of his right side and significant speech impairment. Walt's status as hero is radically changed. His friends become awkward around him.

Walt refuses to leave the apartment building for treatment. His doctor (Mahdur Jaffrey) recommends singing lessons to improve his speech. Walt reluctantly seeks help from Rusty. The relationship between a bigot and a drag queen is an unlikely one that begins with mutual loathing and considerable stereotyping on both sides. Eventually each is forced to renegotiate his own prejudices.

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Brown, anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Drew University, describes the life, religion and healing practices of Marie Therese Alourdes Macena Margaux Kowalski, also known as Alourdes or Moma Lola, a priestess of Voodou, who emigrated to the U.S. from Port-au-Prince in Haiti at the age of 24. What began as an ethnographic research project on immigrant Haitians, turned into a deep personal friendship between Moma Lola and Brown, and a privileged look at the practices and patients of a priestess, and at the socio-cultural lifeworlds of the Haitian community in Brooklyn and in Haiti between 1978 and 1986.

The book presents an intimate description of an alternative healing tradition through a number of perspectives. Brown alternates between a personal, an analytical, and a descriptive narrative of Moma Lola’s own history and her encounters with patients. In some chapters, Brown fictionally reconstructs the patient’s stories, so that the book is part traditional ethnography, and part fiction.

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In 17th Century Dutch depictions of "scenes from everyday life," the so-called genre paintings, the single most popular medical representation is the "Doctor's Visit." Among the most comical and complex are those of Jan Steen, who painted at least 18 works with this theme. Typically the patient is a young female, often suffering from a variety of illnesses related to love, either "love sickness," erotic melancholy, or pregnancy. [See relevant paintings by Steen at the Web Gallery of Art: "The Doctor and His Patient," "Doctor's Visit," and "Love Sickness," at http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/welcome.html. Select "S" from Artist Index, scroll down for Steen, select "Page 1".)

In this painting, the doctor looks with concern at his patient, a young girl, dressed in silk and leaning on a table, as he takes her pulse. Behind her stands a smirking young man who holds a holds a herring in one hand and two small onions in the other. At her feet is an opened letter, alongside a bowl with a piece of burnt ribbon, and a heating box filled with coals, known as a brazier. Behind the physician, a woman playing a harpsichord smiles at the young girl. Behind her, a maidservant beckons a tall, dark, and handsome young man in a red cloak to enter the room.

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Framed on one side of the painting by a luxurious fabric curtain, a doctor, wearing the robe and hat of a degreed physician, stands in the centre of a well-appointed room, examining a specimen of urine in a glass flask. To his right the patient, an older woman, sits languidly with her face turned towards the light of an arched glass window.

A well-dressed middle-aged woman has evidently been feeding the patient, leaning towards her, concerned and attentive, holding a spoon. She is looking at a young girl who is seated on the floor holding a cloth with one hand and the patient’s hand with the other and looking anxiously at the face of the patient. The patient is possibly a grandmother being cared for by her daughter and grandchild.

The triangle of women is physically close, and the emotional intimacy of the two caregivers, their anxiety for the health and physical comfort of the patient, are finely rendered; the disengagement of the patient is conveyed in her gaze beyond the figures in the room towards the light. The physician, whose gaze is directed to the flask, is part of a second triangulation of caregivers surrounding the patient.

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Max Vigne, the most junior member of a survey group mapping the Himalayas in the 1860s, writes letters to his young wife Clara in England. She has prepared in advance of his journey a series of postdated letters which he keeps in his trunk. When these have been read, Clara sends numbered letter packets which arrive sporadically, out of sequence, if at all, over the months of the expedition. Max struggles to describe and to edit his daily experiences on the mountains which are extraordinary, often terrifying, and disorienting for him.

Separated by time, distance, and experiences, they are slowly and irrevocably estranged. Max discovers that his real scientific passion is alpine botany, and he must decide how to tell Clara that he will not be returning to England after the Survey ends. The exchange of letters ingeniously maps out the complexities between Max's love for his wife and his passion for scientific knowledge, and the wide expanse between them.

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A dark comedy about an upper-middle class blended family living the technology overloaded, mall-mad contemporary American life in a small midwestern town until catastrophe strikes. Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. He is married to his fourth wife Babette, who reads tabloids to the blind and teaches posture classes to senior citizens. Together, they have four children, and a quirky extended family.

Interspersed in the noisy, chaotic family relationships is the central questions that obsesses Jack and Babette: who will die first? Death is everywhere in this story--on TV, radio, at the mall, in Hitler studies, and at home. Then an industrial accident releases an "airborne toxic event"--a lethal cloud of Nyodene D. to which Jack is exposed.

Absurd, witty, and almost plausible, the catastrophe answers his question about who will die first, but tells him nothing about death itself. What is the meaning of death, and, by implication, life? In the final section, dying Jack goes to hospital and meets nun Sister Hermann Marie and questions her about her faith. She explains that her piety is only a pretence: . . . "we are here to embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things the world would collapse." (p. 318)

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Two scholars found and translated a personal narrative of a blind 22 year old, Thérèse-Adèle Husson, written in 1825 to the director of the Quinze-Vingts Hospital, an institution that provided permanent lodging and support for the blind in France. Husson hoped to be placed there. Subtitled "Reflections on the Physical and Moral Condition of the Blind," Husson writes about the gait, demeanor, table manners, touch, hearing, character, perceptions of the sun, moon, flowers, furniture and cloth, marriage considerations, and concludes with an education plan for the blind.

After "Reflections" Husson wrote 10 novels, including Story of a Pious Heiress; the editors have included this novel’s introduction, "Note on the Author’s Youth," which gives further autobiographical details. These two writings of Husson are framed by a thoughtful introduction by editors Weygard and Kudlick about the historical conditions of the blind in early 19th Century France, and an equally interesting and provocative concluding chapter about the manuscript, life, and world of Husson.

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