Summary:

A woman, Frida Kahlo, looms in the foreground, central to the painting, facing the viewer fully frontal.  She is nude, except for a sheet that is wrapped around her foreshortened lower body, and the widely spaced straps of an upper-body corset.  The center of her upper body is vertically torn open from neck to pubic region to reveal an Ionic column that is split horizontally in numerous places.  The column pushes up against the figure's chin.  The expression on the woman's face is serious, stoic.  Tears trickle from her eyes and carpenter nails penetrate the skin of her face and the rest of her exposed body, as well as the sheet.  Her long dark hair hangs loosely behind her head, her left ear exposed. Behind the woman stretches a fractured greenish-brown earth, reaching to a strip of sea, which meets the dark blue sky.

View full annotation

Summary:

Endpoint is an extraordinary sequence of seventeen poems John Updike wrote near the end of his life.  Beginning on his birthday in March,  2002, he wrote a poem every birthday for the next 6 years.  Then after his 2008 birthday he wrote several more poems, mostly focusing on his dying from lung cancer.  The last poem, "Fine Point," was dated 12/22/08.  He died in January, 2009.  The poems also include memories of his mother writing and cranking out manuscripts, but never getting published; of childhood friends who became models for characters in his novels; of getting lost in a department store as a three-year-old; of Jack Benny and FDR, Mickey Mouse and Barney Google, as well as five wars. The memories are both personal and international in scope.  His attitude toward them varies from distress to appreciation and gratitude.

View full annotation

Summary:

Frank argues that the modernist conception of illness is a form of "colonization" in that the ill person hands over his or her body (and life narrative) to biomedical expertise. In a post-modern conception, however, the ill person reclaims the authority and ability to tell his or her own story, and to construct a new life narrative from the "narrative wreckage" of serious illness or injury.

Frank identifies four dimensions by which one's relationship to the body may be understood: control versus contingency, self-versus other-relatedness, dissociation versus association with the body, and desire versus lack of desire. Frank presents a diagram (p. 30) in which he sketches four "ideal typical bodies" that arise from various combinations of control-contingency, etc. These include (a) the disciplined body, (b) the mirroring body, (c) the dominating body, and (d) the communicative body. While the first three lead to problems in constructing a satisfactory illness narrative, the last is an "idealized type" in that it is not only descriptive, but also "provides an ethical ideal for bodies." (p.48)

Frank then categorizes patients' illness narratives into three main themes: (a) restitution narratives, in which the plot involves returning to one's previous state of health; (b) chaos narratives, in which all life events are contingent and no one is in control; and (c) quest narratives, in which illness is seen as a spiritual journey. This understanding serves as a starting point for a narrative ethic of illness.

View full annotation

Summary:

The story begins with Theodore Roosevelt's funeral. The narrator, a reporter with the New York Times, decides to tell a story that happened more than 20 years earlier in 1896 when Roosevelt was Police Commissioner of New York City. A serial killer is murdering young male prostitutes.

Roosevelt invites the infamous Dr. Laszlo Kreizler to form a special unit to track down the killer. The unit also includes the narrator and three members of the police department. Kreizler's qualification is that he is an alienist who champions the radical new concept of forensic psychiatry: the belief that one can predict a criminal's behavior by reconstructing his personality based on evidence in the crimes themselves. This concept smacks of determinism. Thus, Kreizler was violently opposed by many, including the religious establishment, who believed Kreizler was denying that people were morally responsible for their crimes.

Because of the sensitivity of their mission, the small investigative unit operates secretly, but runs into powerful opposition. Over several months Kreizler and his colleagues perform the seemingly impossible job of identifying and tracking down the killer, using Kreizler's psychological methods.

View full annotation

Summary:

The French writer Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) developed the form of tertiary syphilis called tabes dorsalis in the early 1880’s. Tabes progressively destroys the structures of the dorsal column of the spinal cord, leading at first to lower extremity ataxia and neuropathic pain, and eventually to paralysis of the legs associated with intractable pain. Daudet sought treatment from the leading neurologists of his time, including J. M. Charcot and C. E. Brown-Séquard, but the disease progressed relentlessly.

At some point Daudet began making notes for a book about his illness. He spoke to several of his contemporaries about this project, but the book never became more than a collection of brief notes, which were collected and published posthumously as "La Doulou" (Provencal for "pain"). This short book, translated here by Julian Barnes, consists of "fifty or so pages of notes on his symptoms and sufferings, his fears and reflections, and on the strange social life of patients at shower-bath and spa." (p. xiii)

The notes are generally in chronological order, beginning with short comments like "Torture walking back from the baths via the Champs-Elysées" (p. 4) and "Also from that time onwards pins and needles in the feet, burning feelings, hypersensitivity." (p. 6) In a long section toward the end Daudet comments on his experience at Lamalou, a thermal spa that he visited annually from 1885 to 1893. "I’ve passed the stage where illness brings any advantage or helps you understand things; also the stage where it sours your life, puts a harshness in your voice, makes every cogwheel shriek." (p. 65)

View full annotation

Summary:

In this novel, with the help of some friends, Gregor Samsa has survived his seeming death at the end of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and joined a freak show in Vienna. A little man named Amadeus Hoffnung, who suffers from Werner’s syndrome (premature aging), runs this Chamber of Wonders. The human sized cockroach proves to be a big hit with the public and a good friend for his assorted colleagues, who come to admire his optimism, compassion, and sense of social responsibility. Gregor thrives, except for the festering wound in his carapace (back) that will not heal--the wound made when his father threw an apple at him during his traumatic early life in "Metamorphosis" as a human-turned-insect.

In 1923, as a result of an life-changing encounter with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the context of growing anti-Semitism in Central Europe, Gregor flies (literally) to New York, where he takes up residence and soon runs into Mr. Charles Ives, the composer and insurance executive, who gives him a job as an actuary. The novel describes Gregor’s subsequent adventures over the next 20 years--as a surprise witness at the Scopes trial, as the subject of Ives’s famous "Insect" Piano Sonata, and finally as the confidant of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and member of his "brain trust." Along the way, Gregor contributes greatly to the science of risk analysis and management.

In 1943, at the president’s request, Gregor joins the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he serves as risk analyst and all-around moral questioner during the bomb’s development. Finally, Gregor Samsa, having survived 30 years as an insect, becomes physically ill as the old apple-infection turns to septicemia; and he becomes existentially ill, as he confronts the implications of nuclear warfare. He decides to commit suicide by placing himself among the instruments at Ground Zero of Trinity site, vaporizing in the explosion of the first atomic bomb; indeed, "Gregor’s was the most expensive assisted suicide in history." (p. 458)

View full annotation

Summary:

Aerobics of the Spirit is a collaborative permanent online exhibition of art by Mary Anne Bartley and poetry by Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D., featuring twenty-nine images and five poems that reflect on sickness. The actual art represented on line consists of acrylic polymer emulsion color canvases and originated at Villanova University, where Bartley is Artist-in-Residence.

The first display (the homepage) includes an Artist's Statement outlining the two artists' tenets that art has a great medical value in the healing process, and that the utilization of one's inner creativity is a powerful treatment in stress reduction. Bartley suffered as a young girl from acute rheumatic heart disease and later became a pioneer in the field of Art in Medicine. Dr. Garcia is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of creative and performing artists.

The first display (image 1) also includes artwork, "Lamentations"-- three sliced off faces in profile on a background of mottled blue-green-yellow-brown. Underneath the faces are outstretched arms with reaching fingers, seeking small heart shaped objects that float nearby.

The third and fourth displays (images 2 through 8, plus un-numbered kite drawings), "A Flotilla of Healing Kites," is meant to evoke feelings including freedom of spirit and place, deliverance from ailment, and childhood wonder. Bartley and Garcia include a song by psychotherapist Bruce Lackie, PhD, recognizing "the importance of the arts in healing the spirit." Reminiscent of Jackson Pollack's work, Bartley's kites possess a vibrant energy that, in contrast to what many would find macabre subject matter--sickness and death--elicits hope and joy from the viewer. Other works exhibited later in the online exhibition are non-representational images, often portraits, which make use of color and unconventional painting techniques to convey similar emotions.

The fifth and sixth displays (images 9 through 12), "Collaboration of Poet and Artist," is a joint project begun at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Section on Medicine and the Arts. Here, Garcia and Bartley dialogue with one another's work in a "Responsorial Psalm." This section includes the text of two poems by Garcia and a reading by him of one of them.

The seventh and eighth displays (images 13 through 24), "Portraits of Our Self and Others: Intimate Conversations We Have with Our Self," focuses on the power of facial depiction in bringing "new meaning to the past," and to "help rescue [an artist] from the depth of mourning." Included are the text and a reading by Garcia of his poem, "Portraiture."

The ninth display, "Vers la Flamme," pairs a three-part poem ("The Consultation," "The Stay," "The Cure") with three paintings-- the kite shaped drawing, "Behind the Dancer's Mask," and images 25 and 26.

The tenth display (image 27), "Homage to Wilma Bulkin Siegel, MD", pays pictorial tribute to Dr. Siegel, a "pioneer in the hospice movement"

The eleventh and twelfth displays (image 28), "Homage to Healers: John Y. Templeton, III, MD," features a painting of surgeons' hands covering an abstract human heart and a corresponding poem and reading. Mary Anne Bartley explains in text following the image Dr. Templeton's role in saving her life during her teenage years, and again "salute[s] this gentle healer:" "I carry the fingerprints of this great man in my own heart."

Dr. Garcia's poem, "Homage," expounds on Bartley's pictorial sentiment with words: "Darkened to nil . . . / to surrender to a surgeon's tryst, / Hands on my heart to cut and to caress / Deeper than any lover any lover ever would." The display also includes photographs of Bartley as a young patient in 1967 at the time of her surgery, of Dr. Templeton, and of all three--Garcia, Bartley, and Templeton--at an exhibition.

View full annotation

Summary:

Mind, Body, Spirit consists of three pictures. The artwork representative of "Mind" shows a woman in a wheelchair wearing a red beret, bright yellow smock, and holding a paintbrush in one hand and a palette in the other. The frame around the seated woman is composed of ovals of one color enclosed in squares of the opposite hue. The woman looks directly at the viewer and sits squarely in the center of her chair and the image. Although enclosed by a thick border, the woman’s feet, and the brushes in her right hand and mouth break out past her boundary.

The depiction of "Body" maintains the same layout template. Here, however, the woman seated in a wheelchair is wearing yellow flippers, a yellow bathing cap on top of which sit goggles, and a red swim outfit. On her lap is a floatation device - a swimming tube - that the woman covers with her folded arms. Four colors comprise the background: blue, green, aquamarine, and purple; these are grouped into shapes evocative of waves in water. As in "Body," the seated figure, although enclosed by thick borders, trespasses beyond; in this picture, her flipper-encased feet challenge the confines of her space.

"Spirit" makes use again of the same template. Here, the background is given perspective and is representational of grass and sky. The blue-green colors are restrained and soothing. The woman meditates in a wheelchair, and is visually balanced with symmetrical positioning of hands, arms, and feet. Her hair is fully visible and uncapped by a headpiece. In contrast to the other two images, her eyes are closed. She is flanked by a blue and green border, beyond which her hands and feet extend.

View full annotation

Summary:

To Kiss the Spirits: Now, This Is What It Is Really Like is in oil on canvas with a painted frame. The work's center is filled with a column of light that stretches like a holy tornado from the top of the frame to the bottom. Within the luminescence exists a spiral staircase up which silhouetted ladies ascend. As the women move from the bottom of the stairs to the top, their colors change from purple to pink to white. The ladies who have reached the top of the stairs gain wings and fly into the starry night.

The bottom of the painting is lined with small, plain houses, some of which are lit interiorly. The sky is filled with stars, which appear in greater numbers the farther their distance from the ground.

View full annotation

Summary:

An overhead ceiling lamp partially illuminates a dreary room, which is colored in glum blues and black. In the center of the print and within the cone of light that extends downwards from the ceiling lamp are two items. One is a square picture on the wall of a gown with lace that appears to be made of barbed wire. The other is a rectangular object on the floor that may either be a bed or a coffin. On top of the rectangular object lies an indistinguishable shape, perhaps clothing. Strewn on the floor of the room is some sort of debris.

The other objects in the room are a dresser with an open drawer and an open box that rests on top of the dresser. The room is sealed; the two windows are boarded up and the door is locked shut with a plank of wood. Writing along the bottom of the picture gives the piece its title: "Hoping to Bring Her Life Together...It’s Not Hard, It Just Takes Time."

View full annotation