Summary:

This selection of Miroslav Holub's poems is organized around five major topics--genealogy, anthropology, semiology, pathology, and tautology--rather than chronologically. The poems, some of which date back to his first collection in 1958, were translated into English by a number of different persons, but mostly by David Young, who has had a long-term collaboration with Holub.

Holub states his major preoccupation in "Bones," the very first poem in this collection: "We seek / a backbone / that will stay / straight." (p. 13) The search reaches its fullest expression in "Interferon," a long poem about messages, messengers, and interference: "Cells infected by a virus / send signals out . . .

And when a poet dies, deep in the night / a long black bird wakes up in the thicket / and sings for all it's worth." (p.159) The first step in the search is to learn to interpret the signals, and to understand the black bird's song. To do that, one has to ask questions. Yet, in the face of enormous "Suffering," we are drawn to passivity: "But I ask no questions, / no one asks any questions, / because it's all quite useless." (p. 147) How to overcome the inertia and proceed, even in the face of likely failure?

Holub reminds us that even "In the Microscope" we find "cells, fighters / who lay down their lives / for a song." (p. 149) In fact, there may be something worth fighting for, although perhaps we can only see it under extreme circumstances, as in "Crush Syndrome," where a concrete mixer snaps up the hand of a man cleaning it: "The finger bones / said a few things you don't hear very often...In that moment / I realized I had a soul." (p. 174). But perhaps what we call the soul is really just our deep yearning to survive, as in "Heart Transplant": "It's like a model of a battlefield / where Life and Spirit / have been fighting / and both have won." (p. 179)

View full annotation

Summary:

Another Dimension is an occasional feature of the journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These essays (and occasionally poems or stories) focus on human and philosophical issues related to medical practice, scientific research, and public health. The intention of this feature is to bring a new perspective to the journal’s coverage of medical science and public health. Some of the essays include a painting or other image that draws attention to the subject matter of the essay.

Managing editor, Polyxeni Potter, with the encouragement of Joseph E. McDade, founding editor of the journal, initiated and is guiding this feature (see also the annotation of Potter: Emerging Infectious Diseases cover art). Since this is a government site, its material is freely available on-line.

View full annotation

Summary:

This brief autobiography, written when Schweitzer was mid-50's, summarizes his life and thought up to 1931. He presents illustrative factoids and incidents from his childhood and student years, then briskly covers his development as a minister, philosopher, biblical scholar, musician, and musicologist, all before he reaches Chapter 9 (p. 102), which is entitled, "I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor." He greatly enjoyed his life as a scholar, yet was plagued by "the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it." (p. 103)

He was particularly struck by the fact that so many people in the world were "denied that happiness by their material circumstances or their health." At around this time (1904), Schweitzer came across a publication of the Paris Missionary Society, which described the needs of their Congo mission. This article changed his life. In 1905, at the age of 30, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Strasburg. (Thus, Schweitzer became a forerunner of today's nontraditional applicants who leave other promising careers to enter medicine.)

Schweitzer and his wife began their work at Lambaréné in Gabon, West Africa, in 1913. As a result of the Great War in late 1917, they were sent back to France and detained as enemy aliens until mid-1918. They returned to Lambaréné and rebuilt the hospital in 1924. Between then and 1931 when Out of My Life and Thought was written, Schweitzer devoted most of his time (as he would for the rest of his life) to doctoring at his hospital in Gabon.

This memoir also includes brief intellectual asides describing many of Schweitzer's famous works, such as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), J. S. Bach (1908), On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1920), Philosophy of Civilization (1923), and The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1930).

View full annotation

Summary:

Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling) travels to the court of Louis XVI at Versailles seeking support for his plan to drain a marsh in order to relieve his poverty-stricken community from the scourge of malarial fever. Naive in the ways of court, he is robbed and left on the road for dead. A kindly doctor and would-be courtier (Bernard Girardeau) finds Grégoire and nurses him back to health with the help of his beautiful and highly intelligent daughter, Mathilde (Judith Godréche).

Grégoire accompanies the doctor to court where he quickly excels in the fine arts of repartee, ridicule, and sang-froid. Seeing this practice as a route to the king, Grégoire plays the game well and begins to have fun, in spite of himself. He attracts the attention of the influential Comtesse de Blayac (Fanny Ardent) with whom he sleeps, despite his love for Mathilde.

A peasant child's death at home inflames his obsession over the marsh. At the moment he is finally about to have the king's attention, he duels with an officer over a matter of honor; he wins the duel but loses his regal audience for having shot a royal soldier. The film ends in the Revolution: Grégoire and Mathilde are well launched in their drainage project and the doctor is an émigré on the English coast learning the fine arts of British humor.

View full annotation

Summary:

On surface, this metaphorically endowed poem details the life cycle of a tapeworm, beginning as a tiny resident in the "protective slime" of mucosae, eventually outgrowing the host, and overrunning the environment as it attains a "philosophical dimension / in which it's the only form of matter. . . . " The parasite shrinks again into "little spores of embecile agreement" which wait for another chance, another cycle of growth and power. The parasite metaphor works beautifully for a wide variety of social and political phenomena the poem does not identify.

View full annotation