Summary:

“Tithonus” is a dramatic monologue that imagines the once handsome, magnificent Trojan prince to be well-advanced in an unfortunate state brought about by negligent gods and his own lack of foresight.  Exultant over the blessings of his youth, he’d asked Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for eternal life, and she had obtained Zeus’s permission to grant the request.  But Tithonus had failed to ask for eternal youth with his immortality—and neither Aurora nor Zeus had managed to recognize that this feature of the request might be important—so that Tithonus spends eternity growing increasingly decrepit.  In Tennyson’s poem, Tithonus addresses Aurora, hoping he might persuade her to reassign him his mortal status and allow him to die.

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The aim of these reflections on uncertainty in medicine is not to discredit evidence-based medicine or to incite suspicion of the careful and caring processes by which most clinicians arrive at the advice they give.  Rather it is to change conversations among practitioners and between them and their patients in such a way as to raise everyone’s tolerance for the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties we live with.  If the public were more aware of the basic rules of mathematical probabilities, how statisticians understand the term “significance,” and of how much changes when one new variable is taken into account—when a new medication with multiple possible side-effects is added to the mix, for instance—they might, Hatch argues, be less inclined to insist on specific predictions.  He goes on to suggest that there is something to be gained from the challenge of living without the solid ground of assurances.  When we recognize the need to make decisions with incomplete information (a condition that seems, after all, to be our common lot) we may refocus on the moment we’re in and see its peculiar possibilities. Changing the conversation requires a critical look at medical education which, Hatch observes, “measures a certain type of knowledge essential to medical practice, but it consequently engenders a conception of medicine best described as overly certain . . . .” 

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The play is set in 1947 (the year it premiered) in New Orleans. Having lost their ancestral Mississippi home to creditors, Blanche Dubois arrives at the shabby French Quarter flat of her sister Stella. When we first meet Blanche she explains she is on a leave of absence from teaching high school English on account of her “nerves.” From her first meeting with Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski, a World War II vet, we detect class conflict and sexual tension between the two of them. As Blanche’s visit becomes more and more protracted, Stanley becomes increasingly suspicious of her motives and background. Meanwhile, she begins to date Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker buddies. Gradually we learn more about Blanche’s checkered past. She was once married to a young man who committed suicide after she discovered him in a sexual encounter with another man. Stanley uncovers rumors that she was fired from her teaching job for having sex with a student. As the play progresses, fueled by her surreptitious drinking, Blanche’s mental state unravels. When Stanley warns Mitch about Blanche’s notorious reputation, Mitch rejects her.  Adding insult to injury, while Stella is having a baby, Stanley rapes his sister-in-law. Blanche’s emotional deterioration is complete. In the final scene, a doctor and nurse arrive to take Blanche to a mental hospital. She initially resists them, but when the doctor helps her up she willingly surrenders: “Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness of strangers"(p. 178).

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After first meeting as college roommates, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm make their way through college and then onto New York City to pursue career interests. We follow them through the subsequent decades as Jude becomes a highly effective attorney, Willem a famous actor, JB an acclaimed artist, and Malcolm a prize-winning architect.  

What starts as a cluster of four eventually separates into an orbit of Willem, JB, and Malcolm around Jude at the center. The gravitational force pulling the three others towards Jude is the fidelity that can form among college roommates and a love that has bonded them together even more. But, there is also a strong sense among the three that Jude needs them for both physical and emotional support. At first, and for a good long time, it’s just a sense, but they later come to learn that their intuitions are right, that Jude does indeed need them and why. Over the years covered in the novel, a second orbit forms around Jude comprising a surgeon-cum-close friend, adoptive parents, a work colleague, and a neighbor. They, too, know Jude needs them, but only learn why late into their relationships. Until then, they are alternatively and often simultaneously worried, angry, flummoxed, and stymied about what’s at the root of his ambulatory limitations and severe leg pains, and why he cuts himself with terrifying frequency.  

Through a fractured narrative sprinkled with artfully-constructed subliminal hints, Yanagihara reveals Jude’s life before he arrived at college. She tells of Jude’s beginnings as a foundling taken in at a monastery. This hopeful start for Jude, however, becomes a childhood and adolescence of unrelenting, horrific, sexual assault and torture—when at the monastery, when on the road after being kidnapped by a monastery brother, when in protective custody, and even when he is able to escape. He arrives at college bearing the psychological and physical consequences of these experiences, but not openly displayed to a degree that yields more than a few hints of a traumatic past. With the support of the people surrounding him in  his adult life, he is able to become a highly accomplished attorney, and to achieve some measure of ease and happiness from time to time. The support he receives, however, is not enough to protect him from the consequences of further psychological and physical assaults, including his self-mutilation practices, and tragic losses. Ultimately, Jude engineers his own final tragedy.  

Some of the people left behind suffer from more than Jude’s loss. His friend the surgeon wonders whether he enabled Jude’s self-cutting by always patching him up and never committing him to an inpatient psychiatric unit. Jude’s adoptive father relives the loss of his first son at a very young age to a rare, degenerative, neurological disease. Nearly all the figures in this novel experience suffering in some form or another, but this is more the story of Jude; how the people around him tried to get him past the horrors of his childhood and adolescence, but eventually and sadly to no avail. 

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This is the third book in a series on the history of medicine and medical education by Kenneth M. Ludmerer, a practicing physician and historian of medicine at Washington University of St. Louis. The first, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education, published in 1985, dealt with the history of medical schools and medical education in the US from their origins in the 19th century to the late 20th century. In 1999 he published Time to Heal: Medical Education from 1900 to the Era of Managed Care. This book, Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine, published in 2015, is a sweeping history of graduate medical education in the United States from its inception to the current day.

In 13 chapters and 431 pages (334 pages of text, 97 of reference and index), Ludmerer traces the residency from early apprenticeship days to its metamorphosis (at Johns Hopkins, of which he is a justly proud medical school alumnus) into the embryonic form of what we now call an internship and residency. Giants like “The Four Doctors” (to use the title of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of William S. Halsted, William Osler, Howard A. Kelly and William H. Welch - but known simply as “The Big Four” at Hopkins) were the godfathers of the American postgraduate medical model which emphasized clinical science, teaching, patient care and research. The rise of acute care teaching hospitals as the venue of postgraduate medical education, and not the medical school or university, is an interesting story and one which Ludmerer tells in great detail over a number of chapters. It is one replete with predictable turf wars, professional turmoil and politics, and societal change in all aspects of the 20th century. This last phenomenon receives its due attention in every chapter but is dissected in meticulous detail in the final chapters dealing with the Libby Zion case, duty hours and the increasing role of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in postgraduate medical education.

Beginning in the 1930’s, American medicine grew increasingly specialized and, in the ensuing decades, subspecialized, much to the consternation of pre-WW II general practitioners who, suddenly and for the first time, found themselves in the minority, in numbers and in influence, of their own profession. Concomitant with the phenomenon of specialization was the imprimatur by academic medicine of the structured, sanctioned residency as the sole route to specialty practice with, of course, the birth of associated accrediting agencies. Along with the move, physically, academically and politically, of postgraduate medical education to acute care teaching hospitals, the control of this education moved from medical schools to the profession at large.

Ludmerer deftly describes the “era of abundance”, the salad days of postgraduate medical education in the 1950’s and 1960’s when giants still made rounds on the floors of postgraduate medical venues; funds were plentiful; outside criticism was an as yet unborn bête noir; and social, economic and governmental curbs were only a tiny distant cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Ludmerer is correct in attributing much of medicine’s professional and social hegemony as well as its transient immunity to criticism in this era to the following evident successes of medicine: antibiotics; initial inroads into antineoplastic therapies; startling technological innovations in imaging; a burgeoning spate of life-saving vaccines; and spectacular advances in surgery, especially pediatric, cardiothoracic and transplant. Fatal diseases of the 1930’s and 1940’s were now often cured in days and of historical interest only.

Like all salad days, those of medicine eventually succumbed to new historical forces: foreign medical graduates in the workplace; the ever-growing financial burden of the residency; and economic pressures like Medicare and its associated regulation. There were other factors, too: professional and societal expectations of standardization and quality care; the explosion in subspecialties; the horrid wastefulness of unnecessary diagnostic tests and therapies borne of an earlier undisciplined abundance; the supercession of the intimate primary physician-patient relationship by the fragmented care of specialists and the rising supremacy of technology over personalized histories and careful physical examinations (why percuss the abdomen when you can get a CAT scan?). Dissatisfaction amongst residents is a dominant theme Ludmerer rightly raises early and often: the conflict and tension between education and service, between reasonable work and “scut”, between being a student and a worker (at times, quite a lowly one).

”High throughput” - the much more rapid turnaround time between admission to an hospital and discharge - has radically changed forever the entire nature of postgraduate medical education, and not for the better in the eyes of the author and of this reviewer, who were fellow residents a lifetime ago at Washington University in St. Louis. This decreased length of stay, a result of the remarkable improvements in diagnosis and therapy mentioned above, meant that the working life of providers (attending physicians, residents, physician assistants and nurses) was in high gear from admission to discharge, thereby increasing tension, likelihood for error and, exponentially, the workload for the resident while simultaneously and irrevocably damaging the possibility of a meaningful, careful provider-patient relationship (like a friendship, of which it is a subspecies, such relationships can not be rushed) and decreasing opportunities for learning. Medicare; changing patient populations; societal and professional disgruntlement; the Libby Zion mess and the ensuing cascade of regulations from all sides, but most especially the ACGME - all receive careful and systematic treatment in the final chapters of this monograph.

Ludmerer ends with a chapter listing what he sees as opportunities for achieving (or re-achieving) excellence. Indeed, he has made it the book’s subtitle. They are the following: a plea for the ACGME to revise its 2011 duty-hour regulations; an equally earnest hope that interns and residents will soon realize a more manageable patient load; a related wish for academic medicine to decrease the unfortunate occurrence of economic exploitation of house officers; a suggestion that this annotator shares, i.e., that the process of supervision, improved (but inadequately) with recent ACGME requirements, be further strengthened; and a hope that medical schools will restore teaching to the central place in the institutional value system it used to enjoy. Ludmerer issues a call for the more vigorous promotion of “an agenda of safety and quality in patient care” (page 312) and suggests that the education of residents be expanded to include venues outside in-patient sites. Elsewhere in the book, he also expresses the expectation that the inclusion into clinical teaching of private patients alongside “ward” patients, more feasible with recent improvements in the re-imbursement of medical care, be routine and maximized to the enjoyment and benefit of all concerned.

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Samuel Shem's (Stephen Bergman) The House of God, first published in 1978, has sold over two million copies in over 50 countries (see annotation).  Its 30th anniversary was marked by publication of Return to The House of God: Medical Resident Education 1978-2008, a collection of essays offering historical perspectives of residency education, philosophical perspectives, literary criticism, and women's perspectives, among others. Contributors include such well-known scholars as Kenneth Ludmerer, Howard Brody, and Anne Hudson Jones, as well as physician-writers Perri Klass, Abigal Zuger, Susan Onthank Mates, and Jack Coulehan.  The closing section, "Comments from the House of Shem," includes an essay by psychologist and scholar Janet Surrey (Bergman's wife) and one by "both" Samuel Shem and Stephen Bergman. 

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The story of The Heart is a simple, linear structure.  A car accident renders a young Frenchman, Simon, brain-dead. A medical team proposes harvesting organs, and his parents, after some turmoil, agree. That’s the first half of the book, the provenance of this specific heart. The second half describes its delivery for transplantation. Administrators find recipients, one of them a woman in Paris. Simon’s heart is transported there by plane and sewn into her chest. All this in 24 hours.  
            
The narration is complex, with flashbacks, overlapping times, and literary art that is compelling. There are 28 sections to the story but without numbers or chapter headings, and these are often broken up into half a dozen shorter sections. We have an impression of stroboscopic flashes on the action, with high intensity focus. These create a mosaic that we assemble into dramatic pictures. Even major characters arrive without names, and we soon figure them out.    

Simon.  He’s called the donor, although he had no choice in the matter. At 19 years of age he’s trying to find a path in life.  A Maori tattoo is a symbol for that search. He has a girlfriend, Juliette. He fades away as a character (except in others’ memories) and his heart takes center stage.  

Marianne and Sean, Simon’s parents.  Her emotions, as we would expect, range widely, especially during discussion of whether Simon’s organs can be transplanted. Father Sean has a Polynesian origin and cultural heritage.

Pierre Révol, Thomas Rémige, and Cordélia Owl are respectively the ICU physician, nurse, and the transplant coordinator. These are vividly drawn, with unusual qualities. Skilled professionals, they are the team the supplies the heart.  

Marthe Carrare, Claire Méjan, and Virgilio Breva are a national administrator, the recipient, and a surgeon. Described in memorable language, they are the receiving team.              

The characters’ names give hints of de Kerangal’s range. Since the 1789 Revolution Marianne has been a well-known French national symbol for common people and democracy, but Virgilio Breva is from Italy and Cordélia (recalling King Lear) Owl (as in wise?) has a grandmother from Bristol, England. We learn of personal habits regarding tobacco, peyote, sex, and singing. Medicine is part of a larger world of people of many sorts.              

Even minor characters, such as Simon’s girlfriend Juliette and other medical personnel are touching and memorable.              

These characters animate the story with their passion, mystery, even heroism. While we don’t know the final outcome of the implanted heart, the text shows the professionalism of the medical team, the French national system that evidently works, sensitive care of patients and families, and in the last pages, rituals of affirmation for medical art and for patients.              

There is richness in de Kerangal’s style. At times it is direct, reflecting the thoughts of characters. At times it is ornate, even baroque. She uses many images and metaphors, often with large, epic qualities. A very long sentence about the over-wrought parents describes them as “alone in the world, and exhaustion breaks over them like a tidal wave” (p. 141).  The style uses many similes, often with dramatic and unexpected comparisons. There are references to geology, astronomy, even American TV hospital drama. The style is at times lyric…we might say “operatic.”  One page about Cordélia is very, very funny.         
  
In a different tone, the details of medicine, law, and ethics are carefully presented, and visual imagery puts us in the hospital rooms, the OR, and crowded streets around a soccer game. Throughout it appears that translator Sam Taylor has done an admirable job.               

The text invites us to consider large visions of wholeness. All the major characters seek some comprehensive unity to their lives, and they avoid orthodoxies such as religion, patriotism, and economic gain. Sean has his Polynesian heritage and boat-building passion, which he has shared with Simon. Cordélia, at 25, is an excellent nurse, wise beyond her years in some ways, but is as dazzled by a man as any teenaged girl. Nurse Rémige has his master’s in philosophy, loves the song of rare birds, and is, himself, a serious singer.  

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This memoir of a life in medicine takes the writer from St. Louis to a Navajo reservation to Central America to the east coast and from urban hospitals to ill-equipped rural clinics. It offers a wide range of reflections on encounters with patients that widen and deepen his sense of calling and  understanding of what it means to do healing work.  He learns to listen to tribal elders, to what children communicate without words, to worried parents, and to his own intuition while calling on all the skills he acquired in a rigorous medical education.  Always drawn to writing, Volck takes his writing work (and play) as seriously as his medical practice, and muses on the role of writing in the medical life as he goes along.

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Paul Kalanithi, diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer when he was a neurosurgery resident at Stanford University, was faced with a decision. Should he truncate his career in neurosurgery in order to become a writer - a career he had always envisioned for himself after completing a couple of decades of neurosurgery practice? Married to Lucy Kalanithi, an internist he had met in medical school, Paul’s career and future had looked bright and promising. But as he entered his final year of a seven-year residency, symptoms of excruciating back pain and significant weight loss began. Garbed in a hospital gown, he examines his own CT scan – this is how we meet Paul at the beginning of the Prologue. He then writes of the relatively brief period of misdiagnosis prior to the CT scan. With the initial negative plain x-rays, he is started on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. But breakthrough pain and continued weight loss leads to the CT. Paul the physician understands the death sentence the images portend; Paul the patient is just beginning his journey. The diagnosis and treatment cause him to reassess his decisions about his life, to decide to father a child even though he knows he will never see the child grow up, and ultimately to write a memoir, essentially for his daughter.

Paul had graduated from Stanford with undergraduate and master’s degrees which reflected his dual love of literature and science. He combined these in a second master’s degree from Cambridge University in the history and philosophy of science and medicine before attending Yale for his medical degree. He and his wife return to California for residencies. The book is largely a blend of his dual interests: a deep and abiding love and faith in literature and how words can reveal truths, and a passion for the practice and science of neurosurgery. The rupture of fatal illness into his life interrupts his dogged trajectory towards an academic medical career, and, like all ruptures, confounds expectations and reorients priorities.

The book has five parts: a foreword by physician-writer Abraham Verghese, who notes the stunning prose Paul produced for an initial article in The New York Times and exhorts the reader to “Listen to Paul” (page xix); a brief prologue; two parts by Paul Kalanithi (Part I: In Perfect Health I Begin, and Part II: Cease Not till Death); and a stunning, heart-breaking epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi. In the epilogue, written with as many literary references and allusions as her husband’s writing includes, Lucy provides the reader with a gentle and loving portrait of her husband in his final days, reaffirms his joy in their daughter Cady, and chronicles how she kept her promise to her dying husband to shepherd his manuscript into print.

The bulk of the book is memoir – a childhood in Arizona and an aversion to pursuing a life in medicine due to his hard-working cardiologist-father, experiences at Stanford which eventually led him to reverse his decision to avoid a medical career, the stages of his medical career and caring for patients, and his devastating cancer. Though initially responsive to treatment—and indeed, the treatment enables him to complete his residency and decide to father a child with Lucy—the cancer is, as prognosticated from the diagnosis, fatal.

What makes this memoir so much more than an exercise in memory and a tribute to the herculean effort to write while sapped by cancer and its treatment, are the philosophical turns, the clear love of words and literature, and the poignancy of the writing. He begins reading fiction and nonfiction again: “I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language…I needed words to go forward.” (pp 148-9) Paul’s writing ends with what is arguably some of the most poetic prose ever written. He concludes by speaking directly to his infant daughter: “When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” (p. 199)

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The book offers a detailed account by one of the nation’s leading cancer researchers of developments in chemotherapy over the past several decades, as well as the recent history of surgical and radiation treatments in the “war on cancer”—a term he resisted at first but finally embraced with full understanding of its implications.  The narrative touches on many of the writer’s own struggles over economic, political, and moral implications of what a NYT reviewer described as a “take-no-prisoners” approach to cure.  He also includes stories about disagreements with other researchers that give some insight into the acrimony that is part of high-stakes science.  At the NIH and later as head of the National Cancer Institute, DeVita faced many decisions about distribution of resources, how much to put patients at risk, and whom to include in clinical trials.  He provides his own point of view on those controversies frankly.  Not much mention is made of the causes of cancer, of nutritional or other complementary approaches, or the environmental factors in the spread of cancer. The strong focus on the book is on the development of chemotherapeutic treatments that have succeeded in raising survival rates, though few current statistics are cited.

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