Summary:

In his preface to Amazing Change, Robert Carroll speaks directly about the power of poetry to heal. At a time of great personal loss, he says, "I began writing as a way of dealing with the inchoate, yet overwhelming, feelings I was experiencing... hopefully, to facilitate a healing process for myself." The poems collected in Amazing Change, which bears the subtitle "Poetry of Healing and Transformation: The Wisdom That Illness, Death and Dying Provide," reveal the depth and power of that healing process. They show the reader that poetic healing not only engages a person in self-discovery, but also in sharing that discovery with others. Wholeness is a community project.

While Amazing Change deals with serious subjects, many of the poems approach the subjects with humor and a light touch of irony. This is particularly true in "Dr. Bob's Psychomedical Poetics--Infomercial 1" (pp. 78-80) and "Dr. Bob's Psychomedical Poetics--Infomercial 2" (pp. 109-111). "Spiritual Soup" (p. 93) is another example of the value of humor in the good life, along with other core ingredients like marriage, prayer, hospitality, blues, hope, and pot luck.

Among the finest poems in this collection is "Kaddesh for My Father" (pp. 47-53). Written in filial homage to the poet's father, in artistic homage to Allen Ginsberg, and in spiritual homage to the Judaic tradition, "Kaddesh for My Father" seamlessly integrates personal detail and anecdote about his father with ritualized expressions of prayer and emotion.  In this and many other poems, Carroll employs poetic form and/or historical exemplars to enhance the meaning of his work, but never allows them to constrain or dilute his personal vision.

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Patrick Clary's Dying for Beginners is a collection of vibrant poems about living (as well as dying); about family, friends, music, loss, war and love. The book's title is evocative of the countercultural insight that dying is an essential part of living.  We only become fully human by coming to grips with our own mortality.  This engagement with mortality emerges from love and humor, as well as from suffering and loss.  Clary's poems speak to what he has discovered about himself, as a beginner to his fellow beginners.

The poet's route to discovery traverses Death Valley, where, during a spiritual retreat and vision quest, he has this epiphany: "Suddenly, I find all my wounds are turning into blessings" (p. 1). This inversion of categories is not an exotic, one-off event, but becomes a new way of looking at the world, a perspective in which life events, carefully observed and described, blossom with deeper meanings that can only be expressed by metaphor or paradox. For example, in "Days I Don't Remember," Clary reflects, "And all my roads are turning into rivers" (p. 27). Or, in "Meditation on the Pays d'Oc," he observes, "Instead of dying, I cough up a butterfly, watch it / dry its wings in the sun..." (p. 74). Or the essential quietism of "That silence moving through our lives was me" (p. 33).

The poet had his first lessons in dying when he worked as a medic during the Vietnam War, In "Orientation at Bien Hoa," he discovers, "Yes, gentlemen / This little war here / Exists only / For one reason: / To give you all the pleasure / You can handle" (p. 10).  He also learns how easy it is to kill with an M 16 rifle, which can "Put eighteen holes in / Whatever you point it at / Inside of two seconds" (p. 11). Meanwhile, the human tragedy of Vietnam takes place all around him.  

Clary reflects on the limits of his calling in "Three Variations", where he observes his own hands, "professionally / Tender on demand, but still uneasy / At your easy tenderness" (p. 35). The words "professionally tender on demand" evoke his work in palliative medicine, although the same words could-and should-apply to medical practice in general.  But Clary recognizes that the human capacity for compassion is not inexhaustible. There will always be a tension between the work that needs to be done ("another pair of hands in the emergency room," p. 63) and our limited reserves of kindness and empathy.

The book ends with a humorous and moving short prose narrative ("Origins of the Earwax Patrol," pp. 83-86) about caring for terminally ill patients.

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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 is a collection of four stories and a novella with pervasive themes of death, loss, grieving, mourning, and anger; the characters live in rural parts of the upper midwest, and there is much unhappiness in their lives.

In "Catch and Release," we accompany Danny, a talented fishing guide "not quite thirty," as he floats down a stream he knows well. He and his siblings have divided his father's ashes, his portion now in a thermos. His father died suddenly, absurdly on a bathroom floor. Although Danny knows nature well (and loves it), he is angry and heartsick. Nor is religion a comfort. Bit by bit he scatters the ashes, but there is no healing ritual.

In "Bloodsport" a young man murders is wife and then kills himself. The town funeral director feels this is "utterly incomprehensible" but provides his professional services to the family and all who  come to the service and burial. He knew the young woman, Elena, and found her attractive; now he embalms her. Twenty years later he feels a "sense of shame" that men "let her down badly."

"Hunter's Moon" presents Harold, a casket salesman. Retired, he goes on long walks, trying to make sense of is life and loves. He likes naming things. His first wife left him for another woman. His daughter (pregnant and drunk) was killed by a train. His second wife left him. His third wife died of cancer. He abuses antidepressants and liquor. Sitting on his front porch, he slumps over. All night a dog keeps watch over, we assume, his dead body.

In "Matineé de Septembre" we find a reworking of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." In both stories, a literary figure escapes ordinary time, falling in love with a young person of the opposite sex, and falling into decadent gestures in the hope of recapturing youth. Both efforts end in failure and death. In Mann's story, the person is an older man of much literary accomplishment. In Lynch's retelling, the person is a professor and "poet of note," although not really of international fame. Actually she's a woman of inherited wealth, a wealthy snob, a narcissist, a survivor of a "perfectly bargained marriage." Her one child was stillborn. A dozen hints at her headaches suggest that she is doomed, and she dies in the last paragraph, without (as in the Mann story) the notice of the literary world.

After these grim tales comes the satiric (and also grim) novella, "Apparition." We follow one Adrian Littlefield (the last name is symbolic) who was a strait-laced pastor, then (after his wife left him) a self-help author who urged post-divorce people to live it up. The satire is trenchant. Adrian's big book is "Good Riddance." A church fundraiser with gambling allows "otherwise devout people to wallow in sin for a worthy cause." Adrian has girlfriends and one-nighters. He's an expensive speaker. Fortunately one Mary De Dona provides him with gratuitous sex, and he is saved. Now 50+, he visits the empty house where his wife once lived, learning little; his tour guide, one "Gloria" is in her 70s, married for 58 years, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He wishes he could have had such a life and feels "a wave of sadness." 

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In 1818, the newly trained physician, John Keats (1795-1821) (Ben Wishaw) is living with his well-off friend, Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), and they are trying to devote themselves to the art of writing. Keats cannot abide the idea of having to practice medicine. 

The uneducated, fashion-conscious Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), notices Keats, moved by the care that he bestows on his dying brother. She offers a gift of a beautifully embroidered pillow, which soon finds it way into the lad’s coffin.

Affected by the young man’s death and the mystery of poetry, Fanny flings herself at Keats, undeterred by Brown’s open disapproval of her lack of class, education and bearing. Flattering his work, she asks Keats for lessons in literature and then reveals herself to a reasonable judge of poetry. In spite of himself Keats is drawn to her and declares his love.

But the poet’s health is fragile. Funds are raised to send him to Italy, and Keats announces that he must go, because his friends have decided. He seems to know that he will die. Fanny is brave and hopeful. Chastened, Charles Brown comes to Fanny’s home to announce the death of Keats in Rome.

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Some 40 years after a ceasefire that ended the Cylon wars, the 12 human colonies across the galaxy have been lulled into a state of calm complacence.  This is abruptly interrupted by a Cylon attack that annihilates billions of humans, leaving only 50,000 survivors in a small fleet of ships, led by the one remaining ship from the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar Galactica.  Fleeing the Cylons, they set out to find the legendary 13th Colony: Earth.

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The author, a young physician, guides the reader in temporal sequence through her years as a medical student, medical resident at several levels, and into the final days of her formal training. The format of the work is anecdotal, that is, a series of memorable patient encounters that seem to shape the writer's developing attitude toward her chosen profession. The precise time frame of the experiences is not clear, but this is an acknowledged story of growing into the practice of medicine as a trainee at Bellevue Hospital.

In describing her interactions with her patients, Dr. Ofri reveals her own doubts about her ability to accomplish some of the things expected of her as "healer." As she grows more confident with experience, she begins to challenge some of the rituals in which medical education seems mired. Each of the chapters is a self-contained story focused on a particular patient, some of which have been published previously as free standing essays. The composite is the physician-writer's personal narrative of her own growth and change.

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This book is exactly what it claims to be in the title. Dr. Ofri gives us fifteen clinical tales, each of which describes a lesson she has learned from a patient or from her own experience as a patient. It is an extension of her first book, Singular Intimacies: On Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (see this database) and relates to her experiences after she completes residency training at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, to which she eventually returns as a staff physician. Three of the stories are examples of how a physician experiences the patient role, including one in which she relates an early personal experience to that of a patient she cares for ("Common Ground").

Since Ofri served as several locum-tenens, some of the stories take her to rural communities and small towns but most concern experiences with patients at Bellevue in clinics or in the hospital. She also discusses the challenges and limitations of teaching the next generation of doctors at Bellevue ("Terminal Thoughts").

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The author of this memoir creates a generally temporally sequential tale of the trials of a family fraught with a series of personal tragedies.  The tale is told by Jessica, the eldest of three daughters.  One of her sisters (Sarah) has a rare genetic disorder which affects the daily life of the family as she requires significant medical attention over the nearly three decades of her life.  Into this demanding  drain   on the young family comes the totally unexpected diagnosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia leveled at the youngest sister (Susie).  Susie becomes acutely ill and over a short period of time, dies.

The reader then enters the drama of the dissolution of the family: a father who becomes dysfunctional and unable to assist and a mother who must pick up the remnants and move on with the surviving siblings.  Sarah and Jessica  move forward and live lives into their young adulthoods.  Then, suddenly, Sarah dies.  The remainder of the tale has to do with the author's assessment of the past and of her future.

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The Crimean War (1853-1856) holds a place in the history of medicine, specifically, the history of nursing. For as the British public read the 1850s Times reports about the total lack of care suffered by their wounded in this conflict, a British nurse, Florence Nightingale, volunteered to recruit a team of nurses to aid the suffering men. The Times created a relief fund for the sick and wounded, and Queen Victoria, an enthusiastic supporter of this war against Russia, sponsored an even larger fund. Female nurses had a reputation for drunkenness and promiscuity. Nightingale made it a point to recruit nuns and women from the lower classes who would be more manageable than educated, upper class women. Three black nurses applied, including Mary Seacole, but they were rejected.

The Turks, British allies, allowed Florence Nightingale the use of their army barracks at Scutari, across from Constantinople: "'I have been well acquainted with the dwellings of the worst parts of most of the great cities of Europe,' Nightingale wrote,' but have never been in any atmosphere which I could compare with that of the Barrack Hospital at night'" (111). Open sewers ran beneath these vermin-infested structures  which were crammed with sick soldiers lying on the filthy floor. There were no supplies and few doctors. Typhus, typhoid, cholera or dysentery killed many patients. Nightingale's meticulous statistics showed alarming escalation of mortality rates; she believed in cleanliness and fresh air but not in the germ theory of disease. When comparing her numbers with those of other military hospitals, Nightingale understood that soap alone would not save the men.

Rappaport describes the nursing offered by army wives, widows and other volunteers, including French nuns. The women's living conditions, especially during pregnancy and childbirth, often resulted in sickness and death. Others volunteered as cooks, including Elizabeth Davis who alleged that while "...she and the other nurses dined on the stewed-up, tough old meat used to make soup for the patients, Nightingale ‘had a French cook, and three courses of the best of every kind of food ... served up everyday at her table'" (168-169).

Nightingale became famous as the heroine of the Crimean War. She is known now as the founder of professional nursing. Recent research has questioned whether Nightingale was the real angel of the Crimea. Rappaport investigates the work of the Jamaican nurse, healer, and entrepreneur Mary Seacole, one of the 3 black nurses rejected for service in the Crimean War. She financed her journey to and stay in the Crimea herself. She built a British Hospital in the Crimea, and treated the wounded at Balaklava there and in the field. The soldiers called her Mother Seacole because she cared for their material and spiritual needs. She sold gin and raki and home-cooked meals, and went bankrupt because too generous with credit. Seacole recouped her losses and achieved bestseller status with her memoir, Mrs. Seacole's Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands (1857), the first memoir by a black woman from Britain.

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