Summary:

Ann, the primary protagonist, is diagnosed with and operated on for breast cancer. Her family history leads her to suspect that she may have passed the breast cancer gene on to her daughters-this assertion without having been tested. She retreats from society. Her husband leaves her and she raises two daughters, ever plagued with guilt. The two daughters, as technology advances, choose to have themselves tested. One daughter, tests positive for BRCA-2; the second daughter is not tested, but is diagnosed with breast cancer.

The mystery becomes: from which parent did the women inherit the gene? While the younger daughter struggles with her progressive cancer, the older daughter goes in search of the genetic contributor. Since this becomes a search for an answer, the answer remains up to the reader to pursue. The angst created by the unanswered questions makes up the bulk of the intrigue, and may emulate real life struggles with this particular disease.

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Chris Eigemann plays Jake Singer, a well-liked middle-aged English professor to a group of privileged students at a posh high school for precocious young white men with floppy hair styles and ironic disdain, located somewhere in New York City. Having just discovered that his ex-girlfriend is engaged, Singer begins a psychoanalytic treatment with an Argentinian analyst, played with relatively understated gusto by Ian Holm. Singer meets Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen), a woman whose deceased husband was a benefactor of the school; she is now the single (and rich) mother of two adopted children.

They fall in love, complicated slightly by Singer's father, a curmudgeonly heart surgeon, and a rather strange plot contrivance involving Marshall's failure to tell the adoption agency that her husband had died even though the biological mother had insisted that the child go to a family with a mother and a father. In one other plotline, left satisfyingly unresolved, Singer has clearly been the mentor to a young African American student, who self-sabotages at this otherwise all-white, all-privileged academy.

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In 1999, eighteen years after Project HOPE began publishing the journal "Health Affairs," the founding editor, John Iglehart, began a new column: Narrative Matters. This book contains 46 of the 80 essays published to date, and an inspiring foreword by Abraham Verghese. The essays are contained in eight chapters-- "Writing to Change Things: Essays on the Policy Narrative," "Dollars and Sense: Hard Financial Realities," "Bearing Witness: Patient's Stories," "The Maddening System: Frustrations and Solutions," "Trouble in the Ranks: Professional Problems," "Drug Resistance: Battling Undue Influences," "Disparity Dilemmas: Stories on Race and Ethnicity," and "Values and Choice: Stories of Practical Ethics." Familiar voices include those of Fitzhugh Mullan (one of the editors), Abigail Zuger, Howard Brody, Richard Lamm, John Lantos, Danielle Ofri, and Carol Levine. The essays in the first section strike an important cautionary tone, reminding readers that the plural of anecdote too often is taken for policy and that the repetition of anecdote should not be seen as evidence.

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Doctor and Doll is part of the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The triangular composition depicts an elderly general practitioner seated in a Windsor chair. A little girl is holding her doll out to him, watching intently as the doctor pretends to listen to her doll's heart through his stethoscope. The fact that the little girl comes to his office and stands up before her doctor suggests that she is coming in for a check-up.

The doctor's large black bag on top of the rug by his feet indicates he makes house calls. Behind the two figures is an old-fashioned desk. On top of the desk are several thick volumes, two brass candlesticks, and two pictures. The image on the left may represent a group of doctors in the style of Rembrandt. On the wall we see a large, framed document which has the word "Registration" on it.

The doctor is wearing a dark suit, cravat, and highly polished, black shoes. He turns his head to the right and upwards as he concentrates on his task. His patient, the little girl, is dressed in heavy shoes, stockings, wool skirt, jacket, scarf, and red beret and mittens. She has removed her doll's dress and holds the dress close to her left side with her elbow. The colors of the painting are dark, but the doctor's head with its gray hair, the doll, and the child's serious face are illuminated.

The girl's red beret, mittens, and the doctor's ruddy cheeks and nose give warmth to the picture. Clearly, the doctor is empathetic and kind, and the little girl trusting. Rockwell paints the ideal country doctor taking time to reassure his young patient that he will do her no harm. His gray hairs make him look fatherly.

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Part of a series, "Letters to a Young . . . [fill in the career]," this collection of essays by pediatrician-author Perri Klass is addressed to her son Orlando during the recent period when he was applying to medical school. The essays follow a chronological sequence, beginning with the decision to apply to medical school, the first two years of medical school, learning how to examine and talk to patients, residency training, physicians as patients, making mistakes, grappling with the most fundamental human issues in medicine, and the mingling of professional work and life.

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In this compelling memoir, Grace, a writer, artist and teacher, unexpectedly finds herself attracted to a carpenter, Howard Staab, whom she meets when looking at a new home. Shortly after their relationship begins, Staab is told in a routine physical examination that he has severe mitral valve regurgitation and will require surgery. Staab, an active, otherwise healthy fifty-three year-old man, has no health insurance. The cardiac surgery will cost over $200,000. Thus Staab and Grace embark on a quest to find an affordable, but excellent surgeon and hospital. Grace details her efforts to find the best care possible, including correspondence with her son, Bryan, a Stanford medical student with interests in international health. These inquiries lead to the possibility of surgery in India.

After a useful, explanatory preface the book begins when Staab and Grace land in New Delhi and enter the Escorts Heart Institute. Staab undergoes a series of tests confirming the need for surgery, which is subsequently performed by Dr. Naresh Trehan. Through Grace's eyes, we also meet nurses, aides, other physicians, administrators and friends. The narrative follows the hospitalization, including dramatic complications and eventual recovery, and also backtracks to better detail the search for care and the predicament of un- and underinsured Americans. Grace also describes the post-hospital phase, including venturing out beyond hospital and hotel walls.

The book, highlighting the fact that Grace and Staab face more than one cultural challenge in this journey, contains both a medical terms glossary and a short list of Hindi terms. Ultimately, Grace concludes she would consider returning to Escorts or a similar hospital should she or a loved-one require surgery, even without the insurance issue. She states: "India, the land of contradictions. Organized chaos. A third-world country with first-world state-of-the-art medical care available for a fraction of the cost of the same procedures here in the U.S." (p. 259)

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Summary: All thirteen short stories in this collection draw readers into the quietly compelling lives of disparate and very ordinary characters who function and suffer in unsettling ways. We are like them and not like them, but their circumstances, while sometimes disturbing, are familiar--and strangely magnetic. The opening lines of "The Lapse" illustrate this power of attraction:

I married Joanne during a lapse. A religious lapse. I don't display my beliefs like a gold medallion, though, as many whom I know do. I prefer to observe in private. After all, any intimate relationship belongs only to the entities or people involved. (p. 35)

Who can bypass an invitation to enter into announced intimacies, however private, that must be revealed in a matter of pages. What lapse and who is Joanne?!

"Bad News," centers around Sheila Powers, a psychologist, whose disruptive marital break-up is compounded by her mother's recent diagnosis of cancer and a subsequent flow of memories about her mother, her father, and herself. She is "between worlds...between life zones." (p. 113) Aspects of the future, at least her mother's, may be somewhat predictable, but the complex depths of the past mix with the present to generate sticky threads that belong to the story and to the readers as well who will recognize bits and pieces of their own family lives.

In a fourteen page story with a decidedly off-putting title, "The Encyclopedia," Wineberg zeroes in on Doris who, after a dissolved relationship, decides to sell the thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica-"the macro-edition, the micro-edition and the year books" purchased by the former couple. Not about remote bits of history or dinosaurs, we discover, but a story about separation, a series of lovers, benign conversation with a fellow worker who claims to be similarly tired of men, a possible buyer for the unwanted encyclopedia, a relationship with the married buyer, an end to the relationship, and a decision to keep the books after all. Her life, we might decide, is encyclopedic, a litany of minutiae that does, indeed, provide information about conditions of existence.

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First published in 1991, and available in reprint edition, this is a compendium of selected artworks and excerpts of diverse medical and literary writings from pre-Hippocratic times to the end of the 20th C. Each chapter integrates selections from medical or scientific treatises, with commentaries written by historians, essays by physicians and writers, and prose and poetry by physicians and by patients. The 235 images in this book include illustrations from medical textbooks and manuscripts, as well as cartoons, sculptures, paintings, prints and sketches. The colour illustrations are stunning and copious, and provide a visual narrative that resonates with each chapter of the book.

The first part of the book, Traditional Medicine, includes chapters on Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment medicine. These serves as a preamble for the second part, Modern Medicine, which includes art, medicine and literature from the early 19th century to the end of the 20th century.

The chapter “From the Patient’s Illness to the Doctor’s Disease” illustrates the rise of public health and scientific research with excerpts from works by Edward Jenner, John Collins Warren, René Laënnec, and John Snow, together with experience of epidemic diseases described by writer Heinrich Heine in his essay on “Cholera in Paris”. The chapter on “Non-Western Healing Traditions” includes botanical research by Edward Ayensu, a short story by Lu Hsun and the writing and paintings of George Caitlin on North American Indian healing.

In the patient-focused chapter, “Patient Visions: The Literature of Illness,” are stories of sickness by Thomas DeQuincey, Leo Tolstoy, Giovanni Verga, Katherine Mansfield, André Malraux, and Robert Lowell. The chapter which follows, “Scientific Medicine: the Literature of Cure,” provides the medical counterpoint with personal correspondence by Freud, medical treatises by Wilhelm Roentgen and Louis Pasteur, an essay on surgical training by William Halsted, and an excerpt from George Bernard Shaw's play, Too True to Be Good, in which a microbe takes centre-stage.

There are chapters on “Medicine and Modern War,” which includes personal writing by nurses Florence Nightingale and Emily Parsons, and poems by Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, and “Art of Medicine,” with works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Anne Sexton, James Farrell and W.P. Kinsella.

The final chapter, “The Continuing Quest for Knowledge and Control,” contains no medical treatises but rather ends with personal reflections by the writer Paul Monette on AIDS, and by physician-writers, John Stone, Sherwin B. Nuland, Lewis Thomas, Dannie Abse, and Richard Selzer.

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The exquisite young artist, Angélique (Tautou) sends a rose to her lover, the cardiologist Loic Le Garrec (Le Bihan). She is planning a future with him; the only problem is that he is married. But he has promised to leave his wife. Angélique is little troubled that the couple are expecting a baby and when the pregnancy is lost following an accident, she believes the day will be soon.

Her medical student friend, David, worries that she is being used and is appalled by the accumulation of disappointments and slights that Angélique must endure. She falls apart, neglects herself and the home and exotic plants that she has been watching for friends, but when she hears that Loic has been accused of assault by a female patient, she is utterly disbelieving. The patient is found dead and the doctor falls under suspicion.

Rapid rewind, and the movie begins again with the rose, and by repeating a handful of earlier scenes, retells the same events from the perspective of the doctor. He has no idea who is the sender of the rose, and as the flowers, notes, and gifts accumulate he grows more distracted, even angry, and his wife is suspicious.

It emerges that Angélique and Loic have barely ever spoken to each other and that she actually volunteered for house-sitting next door, in order to be close to him. The accident that caused the miscarriage was Angélique’s attempt to kill his wife by running her down with a motor scooter. The patient who charged the doctor with assault was wrongly mistaken by him for the secret admirer; he struck her out of anger and fear. She presses charges against him and pursues him through the courts until she is murdered by Angélique.

But the doctor knows none of that. When Angélique attempts suicide with gas, he saves her life and she is all the more smitten. Gradually the doctor realizes her real identity and the police link her to the murder. She is sent to a psychiatric hospital.

Years pass. Loic and his wife have two beautiful children. Angélique is finally discharged with reassurance that she will be well as long as she takes her medicine. In the final scene, the caretaker moves a large cupboard to find all the pills that she had been prescribed over four years pasted to the wall in a larger-than-life portrait of Loic.

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This memoir chronicles the pre-adolescent and adolescent years of the author, the son of an alcoholic, abusive mathematics professor father and a psychotic Anne Sexton-wannabe confessional poet mother. The only family member who does not abuse the boy in any way is estranged--an older brother with Asperger’s syndrome. Meanwhile, the amount of trauma to which young Burroughs is subjected boggles the mind. Just when one thinks it couldn’t get any worse, it does.

Burroughs, who loves bright, shiny, orderly things, also likes doctors--paragons of cleanliness, virtue and wealth. Unfortunately, his mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, described as a charismatic Santa Claus-look-alike, is unethical, bizarre and squalid. As Mrs. Burroughs becomes more and more dependent on Finch, she allows her son to be adopted into the crazy Finch household.

This family includes wife Agnes, who copes with her husband’s infidelity by sweeping madly; son Jeff, daughters Kate, Anne, Vickie, Hope and Natalie; grandson Poo; and adopted son, Neil Bookman, who is twenty years older than Burroughs and homosexual. When Burroughs is thirteen, and has told Bookman that he, too, is gay, Bookman forces the boy to have oral sex. They become lovers.

The Finches, meanwhile, exhibit their quirks and weird tendencies in multiple ways. "Bible-dipping" is popular to read the future, as is prophesying by examining Dr. Finch’s turds. A patient with agoraphobia, Joranne, lives in one of the rooms--in fact, she has not left the room in two years. Young Burroughs is allowed to smoke and drink. When Burroughs says he doesn’t want to return to school, Dr. Finch facilitates this desire by giving Burroughs alcohol and pills to fake a suicide gesture, then hospitalizes the boy.

Yet Burroughs manages to befriend a couple of the Finch daughters, and to survive his childhood. The book closes with his departure for New York City and with an epilogue outlining various people’s outcomes. Finch lost his license due to insurance fraud.

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