Summary:

In 2008, editor and physician Paul Gross launched a new online publication, "Pulse--voices from the heart of medicine" (published by the Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center). This anthology contains every poem and first-person narrative published during Pulse's first year, arranged in five sections corresponding to publication date and not to theme: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring.  Paul Gross, in his introduction, states "After more than a decade of practice as a family doctor, I came to appreciate that the science I'd learned in medical school, though powerful and useful, was also incomplete . . . . it contained much truth about illness and healing, but not the whole truth" (xvii).  Like many other caregivers, Gross discovered "that writing and sharing my healthcare stories with others was therapeutic" (xviii).  He looked to "Sun Magazine" as an example of how first person narratives, both prose and poems, could turn "hurts and triumphs into something potentially beautiful, funny or moving" (xviii). 

The poems and prose that arrive every Friday online to Pulse's thousands of subscribers (and the selections in this anthology) are carefully screened by the editors according to these guidelines: the stories have to be first-person, and they have to be true, recounting the writer's own experience.  Submissions are accepted from any person involved in healthcare.  The language used must be "clear, simple language.  No medical jargon. No arcane literary devices" (xx).  Gross and his editors decided that Pulse would not be a medical journal nor a literary magazine--its purpose fell outside the perimeters of both genres--and so Pulse, and this anthology, offers work that is, in a refreshing and honest way, different from the slick or more polished poetry and prose that might be found elsewhere.

In reading this anthology from cover to cover, and so from season to season, I found that the poems and prose seemed to fall into several categories: Personal musings, in which authors relate healthcare experiences that engender intimate and revealing narratives about their own lives--among the best of these are "Well Baby Check," p.3; "Finding Innisfree," p. 31; "First Patient," p. 39; "Losing Tyrek," p. 45; "Carmen's Story," p. 62; and "Chemo? No Thanks," p. 106.  Other pieces are commentaries on the other side of healthcare, the one that cries out for reform and affects both patients and caregivers.  Among the best of these are "Redesigning the Practice of Medicine," p. 9; "A Brush with the Beast," p. 22; "Rx," p. 60; "Halloween Horrors," p. 69; and "Brain Cutting," p. 136.

Other pieces are humorous ("Aunt Helen Sees a Ghost," p. 6) or political ("My War Story," p. 11), and many poems and prose pieces speak of patient encounters or about being a patient, some more anecdotal, relating a specific incident that affected the author ("Once," p. 41) and others multi-layered, some relating medical student or intern experiences ("Jeannie," p. 48; "A View from Nepal," p. 87; "Ripped from the Headlights," p. 90; "Snowscape," p. 97; "First Night Call," p. 100; and "Wounded Messenger," p. 114.)  The "category" I found most interesting and most unique are the selections I will call "confessions."  These writings--demonstrating openess and bravery on the part of the authors--tell of regrets, mistakes, sorrows, wrong calls and other mishaps that occur, daily, in the practice of healthcare.  In these, the most human face of caregiving is revealed.  Although most of the pieces in this anthology contain elements of "confession," the most specifically revealing include "Mothers and Meaning," p. 14; "Physician's Exasperation," p. 44; "Confidential," p. 53; "My Patient, My Friend," p. 73; and "Apologies," p. 104.

Editor's note: Coincidentally, a recent relevant paper on confessional writing by physicians expounds further on this topic:"Bless Me Reader for I Have Sinned: physicians and confessional writing" by Delese Wear and Therese Jones (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Vo. 53, No.2, Spring 2010, pp. 215-30).

 

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This edited anthology, which includes poems, essays, short stories, and other creative forms (e.g., a radio diary, a letter to a social service agency), is organized into sections that include Body and Self, Diagnosis and Treatment, Womanhood, Family Life and Caregiving, Professional Life and Illness, and Advocacy. Most works found their way into this collection through a call for submissions, although a few selections are well known, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "So You're Going to Have a New Body !," or an excerpt from Rachel Naomi Remen's Kitchen Table Wisdom (see annotations). In addition, the anthology also includes essays by scholars such as Arthur W. Frank and Rita Charon, who theorize gendered illness narratives.

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This is an anthology of 32 pieces, many directly relating to war and its aftermath, or, in general, kinds of violence humans inflict upon each other and the ensuing suffering: hence the title, "echoes of war." The pieces include short fiction, essay, a dozen poems, and a photo collection. Since none are lengthy, this is a good reader to supplement other longer texts or to serve as an anthology for a reading group. A short essay, "Suggested Longer Readers," mentions some three dozen pivotal topics, including "homecoming" and "sense of identity." 

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This anthology is part of an emerging literature of HIV/AIDS in Africa. It offers individual stories about the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa as a means of countering the mind-numbing statistics on infections and deaths. As the literature of the AIDS crisis in the United States in the 1980s and 90s brought to the general public the subjective experience of HIV/AIDS and thus strengthened the socio-political will to combat the virus, so this emerging literature of AIDS in Africa will deepen awareness about the crisis, engender sympathy for the individuals who suffer from it, and ideally help to shape an effective response to alleviate the devastation being wreaked by this epidemic.

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This thought-provoking book is a collection of readings which the editors have found to be particularly useful for a course they teach, "What’s Normal?" It is their intent to facilitate consideration of how the world is experienced by those who are socially marginalized because of their physical appearance. The title of the anthology derives from an article written by the literary critic, Leslie Fiedler, and reproduced as the lead-off essay. Fiedler argues that the propensity of cultures throughout history to define the normal and to make political decisions about physical "abnormality" has reached a point where the rich will perpetuate the cult of normalcy (by paying for medical treatments that ensure it) while "the poor . . . will be our sole remaining Freaks."

The anthology is divided into several sections: Part I contains nonfiction articles, essays, and excerpts from books. Part II reproduces fiction, poetry, and drama and is further subdivided into "Abnormal Weight and Eating Disorders"; "Abnormal Height-Dwarfism"; and "Deformity and Disability." Many of the pieces have been annotated individually for this database (e.g. Fat by Raymond Carver, annotated by Carol Donley and also by Felice Aull and Irene Chen; Skanks by Rennie Sparks; The Fat Girl by Andre Dubus; Weight Bearing by Patricia Goedicke; Dwarf House by Ann Beattie; The Song the Dwarf Sings by Rainer Maria Rilke; The Dwarf by Ray Bradbury; The President by Donald Barthelme; The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance and others).

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Editor Helman is a physician and anthropologist as well as a published author of short stories, essays, and a medical anthropology textbook. For this anthology he has selected short stories, case studies, memoir and novel excerpts whose purpose is "to illustrate different aspects of [the] singular but universal relationship" between doctors and patients (1). In the introduction he discusses how these selections illustrate storytelling in medicine; the unique experience of individual illness; differences between fast-paced contemporary technological specialized medicine, and an older more leisurely medicine where the physician employed all his/her senses to diagnose illness, doctors made house calls, and patients recovered over time, or died.

The anthology is subdivided into three parts: "Doctors," represented by the work of Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rachel Naomi Remen; "Patients," represented by authors Renate Rubenstein, Ruth Picardie, Rachel Clark, Clive Sinclair, W. (William) Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry; and "Clinical Encounters," with work by Oliver Sacks, Cecil Helman, William Carlos Williams, A. J. (Archibald Joseph) Cronin, Anton P.Chekhov, and Moacyr Scliar. (In total there are 16 selections.) Each piece is preceded by a paragraph of biographical information about its author and an introduction to the text.

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This anthology culls 1,500 excerpts from approximately 600 works of literature primarily written in the past two centuries and representing all major genres--the novel, drama, poetry, and essay. These brief selections highlight how literature portrays the medical profession and also provide ample evidence of many recurrent themes about the doctor-patient relationship and the personal lives of physicians present in the pages of fiction.

The book is organized into eleven chapters devoted to the following subjects: the doctor's fee, time, bedside manner, the medical history and physical examination, communication and truth, treatment, detachment, resentment of the medical profession, hospital rounds, social status, and the doctor in court. Many well-known authors including Anton P. Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, W. (William) Somerset Maugham, Leo Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, and William Carlos Williams are featured in this anthology but less notable writers are also introduced. A twenty-three-page bibliography of primary and secondary sources is a useful element of the book.

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This anthology of 38 autobiographical works by women with HIV/AIDS is edited by two women who are HIV positive. The introduction summarizes how the editors solicited writing or other expressions from HIV-positive women in order to publicly recognize the stories of women living with HIV/AIDS. Although most of the works are from Canada and the USA (including some from native populations), 12 other countries are also represented, including many African and European countries. Most of the pieces are prose, but poetry, art and photography are also included.

The pieces are very diverse and reflect multiple perspectives: activist, feminist, mother, teenager, drug addict, prostitute, lesbian, heterosexual, victim of abuse, etc. The stories are personal, introspective, direct and specific. Yet, throughout the anthology, universal themes of loneliness, isolation, hope, love and love lost recur.

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This outstanding anthology of poems, stories, excerpts and essays by African-American writers is prefaced by a poem ("Aunt Sue’s Stories" by Langston Hughes), a foreword, two essays and an introduction. The book is then divided into three sections: Section I, Illness and Health-Seeking Behavior; Section II, Aging; and Section III, Loss and Grief.

Each section begins with an introduction which clarifies the choice of the section’s theme and briefly describes each piece. At the conclusion of each section is a list of ten to fifteen questions which "are intended for personal reflection and group discussion." Brief autobiographical information for each of the thirty-one authors is presented in Appendix 1.

As Secundy notes in the introduction, a divide exists between the health care worker and patient, which is particularly prominent when color and economic status are different between them. Secundy, as an educator in the medical humanities, selected pieces that reveal "the significance of color and social distinctions" when African-Americans face illness or enter the health care system.

The selections chronicle struggle and survival, illness and loss, humiliation and pride, triumph and sorrow. These pieces speak to all of us, as Edmund Pellegrino states in his essay, "Ethnicity and Healing": "[p]aradoxically, as we learn more about the uniqueness of African-American culture, we are drawn closer to the common humanity we share with the subjects of these stories and poems."

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The idea for this anthology of poetry and prose about Alzheimer's disease patients and their caregivers arose from the editor's own experience writing about her mother. Encouraged by Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, and others, Holly Hughes invited writers to contribute poems and short prose pieces that witnessed to the human experience of Alzheimer's disease. The resulting anthology includes about 120 pieces chosen from over 500 submitted. The editor has arranged these in a series of thematic sections, one of which, "Missing Pieces," contains the nine prose contributions to this primarily-poetry anthology. At the end of each work, the author has provided the reader with a brief (two or three sentence) comment on the circumstances that led he or she to write it.  Tess Gallagher's Foreword describes her experience living with, and caring for, her mother who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, two "widows together" (p. xv), during the months and years after Raymond Carver's death (Gallagher was married to Carver).

The works address an array of closely related themes in a wonderful variety of voices. A major focus is the Alzheimer's patient's slipping away, withdrawing, changing, whether it be toward dissolution, or into a different country. Sometimes the change reveals "your true life: / the bright unruffled water, / a sudden lift of wings," as in Linda Alexander's "Your True Life" (p. 23). Sometimes life has fled elsewhere, as in "No Destination" by Penny Harter (p. 67), or gradually dissolved ("Verbal Charms" by Melanie Martin, p. 41). Other poems evoke the unexpected and sometimes humorous antics of the demented. Witness, for example, Len Roberts' "My Uncle Chauncey Drove My Aunt Eleanor" (p. 36) and "Early Alzheimer's" by Sheryl L. Neims (p. 55). Another theme is the loving commitment of spouses who are taking care of a demented partner so many years after saying "I do" "This is what you signed on for / in such bodily earnest before the distractible / justice of the peace 64 runaway years ago" (E. A. Axelberg, p. 79). Parent-child relationships also take on new meaning, as in the touching poems "Bath" by Holly Hughes (p. 119) and "Pacific Sunset" by Arthur Ginsberg (p. 127). Finally, the inevitable themes of death and mourning pervade the anthology's last section entitled, appropriately, "Still Life."

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