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."

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A woman's profile occupies the foreground of this computer-generated image. She is depicted from the base of her neck up to near the top of her head. A blue device protrudes from her neck, and a small section of a ridged tube, presumably connected to the blue device, occupies the bottom right-hand corner of the image. The device is a tracheal breathing tube, shown in the online photograph of the artist that accompanies the image. Worsham suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

The lady in the artwork wears a polka dot blouse and a vibrantly patterned hat. Her eyes look directly forward, as though oblivious to the onlookers in the image's background, and her mouth hangs agape. She wears lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge.

A young boy's face with big eyes, rosy cheeks, and brown hair looks impudently at the woman from the lower right half of the image; his mouth holds a slightly upturned grin. Behind the boy and occupying the background stands a woman whose green eyes stare at the disabled lady's profile. The staring lady has long light brown hair and she wears lipstick, makeup, a purple kerchief, and a green dress. Partially separating the boy and the woman from the disabled lady is a thin band of blue background - presumably sky - that cuts down through the center, albeit the background, of the image.

A dull green border of blocks frames the scene. Each corner is decorated with a red heart, the points of which angle into the center of the image. Big block letters inscribe the artwork's title: the top of the frame reads "HEAD," the bottom reads "TURNER."

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In the foreground, staring directly at the viewer, white tears visible on her cheeks, the artist lies immobile in a four poster hospital bed, only her head visible above the white sheet covering that is decorated with pale, pastel circles of cells or microscopic organisms.  The towering wooden oak easel that held her canvases, allowing Frida to paint when ill, is now the structure supporting a funnel of physical and emotional preoccupations erupting as vomit from her mouth: fish heads, dead chicken carcasses and fowl entrails, and skull inscribed with her name.  The background is a barren, parched and cracked desert.  The solitary objects in the sky, a moon and red-orange rimmed sun, suggest being trapped eternally, day and night, in this state, "Without Hope" --the painting's title. On the back of the painting Kahlo wrote, "Not the least hope remains to me....Everything moves in tune with what the belly contains."  [Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: HarperPerennial) 2002, p. 187]

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Aging, Jewish-Canadian gum-shoe, Benny Cooperman, awakes in hospital from a coma to discover that he has forgotten many things about himself and his recent past. He has also lost the ability to read, although he still can write: alexia sine agraphia. The therapists give him a memory book as an aide to functional recovery; he must record vital information for later deciphering. He learns that he was found unconscious in a dumpster with a blow to the head; beside him lay the corpse of a woman professor.

Leaving the hospital only once (without permission), Cooperman uses dogged determination and ingenuity to unravel the complex academic homicide. Adapting to his own disability proves just as demanding to Cooperman as solving the murder. Without giving away the ending, this "whodunit" involves premonitory dreams, pretty students, rogue professors, a crusty underworld, and drugs. Engel's trademark light touch and vignettes of Toronto and its University colleges and hospitals add humor and credibility to the vivid yarn.

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Robin Carr, a Torontonian in her mid-twenties, has serious inflammatory bowel disease, which by the end of the book has lead to twelve abdominal operations. The story begins as she anticipates further surgery to close her ostomy and create a pelvic pouch. Failure of the surgical procedure seems to bring about failure of her marriage. She is reminded of her father's own experience with an ostomy and his death of bowel cancer, as she establishes new relationships and grapples with her mortality and the possibility that she may never be able to have children.

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In 1917, the poet Siegfried Sassoon protests the war in a London newspaper. He is saved from court martial by a military friend who argues successfully for his transfer to the Craiglockhart War Hospital where he comes under the care of psychiatrist, William Rivers. Sassoon is not sick, but he and his doctor both know that the line between sanity and insanity is blurred, especially for a homosexual and in a time of war.

The other patients, however, are gravely wounded in spirit if not body; sometimes they are tormented by uncomprehending parents and wives. Rivers’ efforts to unravel their nightmares, revulsions, mutism, stammering, paralysis, and anorexia begin to shake his own psychic strength and lead him to doubt the rationality--if not the possibility--of restoring them to service. He yearns for his pre-war research in nerve regeneration, the quixotic enterprise that serves as a metaphor for his clinical work.

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Summary:

Shay, a psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), juxtaposes the narrated memories of his patients who are Vietnam veterans to the story of Achilles in Homer's Iliad. He finds that the roots of their illness, like that of the ancient hero, lie in betrayal of duty by senior officers who failed to do "what's right," in the repression of grief, and in the social limitations imposed on expressions of love between men.

These stressors lead to guilt, wrongful substitution, and dangerous rage, called the "berserk" state. The mental pathology is fostered by an equally wrongful failure to honor the enemy; return to "normal" is never possible. The book concludes medically with recommendations for prevention.

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Returned from combat, Tayo, a mixed-blood Laguna, struggles to regain his health and mental equilibrium. Suffering from what his physicians term "battle fatigue" and the lingering effects of malaria, Tayo had become dysfunctional when he was ordered to shoot several of the enemy and sees in them the faces of his own ancestors.

Later, at the VA hospital, Tayo is told by white doctors to avoid "Indian medicine" and to remove himself as far as possible from his community and heritage. He is heavily sedated and experiences himself as "white smoke."

After he leaves the hospital and returns to his aunt and her family, Tayo's illness worsens (including chronic nausea and vomiting, hallucinations, and weeping). Finally his grandmother calls in a traditional healer who starts Tayo on an intense journey of inner healing (and encounters with other Native American healers) and reconnection with his painful but rich past.

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This play was suggested by the book, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James H. Jones, and by a number of primary sources. It brings to the stage in a fictional way the story of the interaction between an African-American public health nurse assigned to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and four of the African-American participants in the study. Two physicians, one who is head of the Tuskegee Memorial Hospital, and one from the U.S. Public Health Service, are less important characters, but provide the evidence of the government's complicity in the study.

The physical setting of the play is the Possom Hollow Schoolhouse, and there are changing "testimony areas" where a 1972 Senate subcommittee investigation of the Tuskegee study is taking place. The theatrical setting is, however, the conscience and memory of Eunice Evers, the nurse, as she is pulled into and out of the action to give testimony to the audience.

Act One takes place in 1932, and allows the audience to become acquainted with the four African-American men who, along with several hundred others, become part of the study after their blood has been found to test positive for syphilis. The treatment of the infected men with mercury and arsenic comes to an end after six months because of a lack of funds, and a decision is made by the Public Health Service to continue a study of untreated syphilis in these men. A fifty-dollar life insurance policy is given to each man as an inducement to remain in the study.

Act Two carries the lives of the characters through the introduction of Penicillin as treatment for syphilis in 1946--a treatment from which the Tuskegee study patients were excluded--and on to 1972, when the Senate committee hearings were held. The Epilogue is about the big guilts of the government and the little guilts experienced by Miss Evers as she questions her nursing ideals.

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The story of a woman artist's slow decline into dementia and death as told through the eyes, words, and reflections of her philosophy professor son. Through his memories of their 1950s life together, he reconstructs a speculative analysis of her early married life with his soil-scientist, Russian-immigrant father.

The one older brother becomes a neuropathologist who investigates the very disease that slowly strips their mother of herself. Their father tends to her growing needs at the family farm, but he dies suddenly and she must be placed in an institution where one nurse alone seems to respect her dignity.

The brothers' rivalries and misunderstandings are recapitulated in their different responses to their father's death and their mother's illness: the physician retreats to scientific explanations of the "scar tissue" in her brain; the philosopher looks for evidence of personhood and for reassurance that death should not be feared. His obsession with his mother's condition stems from a deeply felt sense of guilt; it destroys his marriage and condemns him to depression, hypochondria, and shame as he creates and diagnoses the same illness in himself, long before it can be detected by doctors.

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