Summary:

This is an aerial view of a comatose patient being force-fed by a funnel leading directly into her stomach. Surrounding the consultation table are six (identifiable) black-robed supreme judges gleefully pouring nutritious foods (grapes, fish, Quaker Oats, peanut butter, water and 7-Up) into her. Two tiny symbols, the scales of justice and a red-white-and-blue eagle contribute to the otherwise empty courtroom decor.

In the upper right corner, barely visible, is an open door with a "Keep Out" sign dangling from its knob, through which a doctor and nurse peer in. Four tiny red paper-doll figures holding hands, symbolizing the family, are also by this door. Hanging precariously over the patient and consultation table is an ugly, large, bare 25-watt light bulb.

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A collection of poetry written by a family doctor  who practices in New Zealand. They are grouped around themes: patients (20 poems), diseases (10 poems), spells (9 poems), a doctor (9 poems), and end with “Playing God,” which is a collection in 10 parts about clinical practice. 

Miracles and wonders are found in the physiological workings of the body. Myths and spells are identified in the rituals of practice guidelines. 

The poet loves medicine even as he realizes some of the unpleasant challenges and distortions it brings to his life and behavior.

 

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Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a 27 year-old writer is happy in his work and lives with Rachael, a painter, but he has not been feeling well. He goes for tests. The doctor—without looking him in the eye—bluntly tells him that he has spinal cancer and needs chemotherapy. With the support of his good friend, Kyle (Seth Rogan), Adam begins his treatments. Together they shave his head and he bonds with the much older men being treated at the clinic. Rachael promptly takes up with another man and Adam throws her out. He is assigned a 24 year-old psychotherapist, Katherine  (Anna Kendrick) who is out of her depth in dealing with his condition and his fears, but they have an affinity for each other that will eventually “conquer all.”

Adam has an uneasy relationship with his mother (Anjelica Huston), a domineering personality who is coping with her husband’s slide into dementia.  His illness forces him to see more of his parents and he slowly realizes how much she cares for him and wants to help; however, he avoids her and rarely volunteers any information.

In another encounter with the inept doctor, Adam learns that the chemotherapy hasn’t worked and he is referred for surgery. The woman surgeon’s bedside manner is even worse: incredibly, she meets him for the first time only as he is being wheeled into the operating room. 

But the surgery is a success, and the film closes with Adam and Katherine falling into each others arms -- a disappointingly happy Hollywood ending.

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In 1953 Alice Neel created a series of ink and gouache drawings depicting the last weeks of her mother's life, which were spent in a New York city hospital. One of these is at the Robert Miller website linked to this annotation. In the drawing, a black nurse comforts a prone elderly lady. The pale hues of the painting--blue, black, white--evoke a somber mood and imply sickness. This sense of despair is augmented by a harsh cityscape background beyond a dark river, which the viewer sees through a window.

Compassion counters these desolate surroundings, however, for a bond is apparent between the nurse and elderly patient. The nurse's hands rest on the patient in a partial cradling gesture, and the trajectory of the lines made by the nurse's arms and hands and the elderly patient's flowing hair establishes a visual and emotional link. The connection between the two figures is supplemented by the thin smiles on both women's faces.

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A nurse clothed in white and holding a baby stands in the center of a hospital ward. Surrounding her sit adults colored brown and grey. Naked babies lie mostly unattended on white beds. Most of the newborns share the same posture--their arms are splayed and their legs are raised towards the ceiling. A handful of adults in the room attend to the children. Their blurred faces and pallid coloring assign them a baleful monstrousness.

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Mary Sutter has been trained as a midwife by her widowed mother, and has demonstrated an unusual aptitude.  She is an eager learner, but her deepest desire is to be a surgeon.  No medical school will take her, however.  As reports reach her home town of Albany of the escalation toward civil war around Washington DC, and in the wake of a disappointment in love,  she decides to board a train and offer her services to Dorothea Dix as a nurse.  Though Miss Dix refuses her on the grounds of her youth, Mary finds her way into apprenticeship with a surgeon who, as the numbers of injured climb, needs all the hands he can get.  Slowly and grudgingly, he comes to accept her as a competent assistant and, eventually, to teach her as a respected apprentice, and the remarkable companion she has become to him.  She learns surgery in the most grueling circumstances possible, amputating shattered limbs of young men, many of whom die anyway of infection or water-borne diseases.  In the course of her sojourn in Washington she meets John Hay and, through him, President Lincoln, whose compassionate attention she manages to direct to the dire need for medical supplies.  Two men love her not only for her intelligence and courage, but for the passion she brings to the hard-won skill that, though it cannot save her brother from the respiratory illness that is rampant in the camps, or her sister from a disastrous childbirth, saves many lives and makes a wider way for women of her generation who find themselves called to medicine. 

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Summary:

A Natural History of the Dead is a story in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is divided, by subject and style, into two parts, the first part of which reads like non-fiction and the second a short story, or the nidus of one.

The first section (4.5 pages) is a fairly grisly accounting of the title and describes different modes of dying and the dead, especially in war time, especially regarding WWI.The second section (2 pages) involves a medical unit with a field physician and several soldiers, none of them officers as high as the physician. They are discussing a terminally injured soldier who is dying of a devastating injury to the head. The physician does not want to waste any effort or, worse, his limited supply of morphine on a lost cause. Eventually there is verbal and even physical violence over this dispute.

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Summary:

'Smut: Two Unseemly Stories' consists of two novellas, 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson' and 'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes'.   Both are slight but well-observed and nimbly narrated stories about sex and manners.   

In 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson', a newly widowed woman has to make ends meet; she takes in lodgers (initially a medical student and her boyfriend) and finds herself employed at a local medical school as a standardized or simulated patient (a patient instructor), joining several other stalwart characters in feigning illnesses and ailments for the educational benefit of training doctors.  When her tenants do not have the money to pay their rent, they find another way of reimbursing Mrs Donaldson.  'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes' is about the marriage of vain handsome Graham Forbes to a wealthy, although not particularly beautiful, woman, much to the frustrated dismay of his mother.  In both novellas, secrets about sex and surprising erotic arrangments threaten the measured, middle class lives of the Donaldson and Forbes families.  

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In 1964, newly minted doctor, Barry Laverty, begins practice as the young assistant of crusty, seasoned, Dr. Fingal O’Reilly, in the small, Northern Irish village of Ballybucklebo. At first he thinks his new boss is fierce and unprofessional. But soon, Barry uncovers the sadness in the older doctor’s past and realizes that O’Reilly has excellent, clinical acumen. If he bends the rules, it is usually for the best.

Over the course of a month they face the ordinary struggles of general practice with Barry slowly learning the ropes: appendicitis in a child, a rushed delivery, pneumonia combined with heart failure, hypothyroidism, unwanted pregnancy, and stroke. And of course, the more minor staples of headache, cuts, and scrapes.

Not everything turns out well. Barry misses a diagnosis and cannot stop blaming himself, but his admission of the error to the patient’s wife is an important step in his education. The patients, however, leave the practice.

Social factors such as poverty, discrimination, and corruption of local officials pervade each vignette.

Barry also meets the beautiful Patricia—a survivor of polio—whose desire to pursue a career in civil engineering seems to pose an obstacle until all is happily resolved in the end.

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During World War II, a man is found beaten and unconscious in the streets of Trieste and brought to a German hospital ship. The Finnish-born doctor serving the German naval forces recognizes the name on his uniform as that of a vessal originating in Helsinki, the “Sampo Karjalainen." When the man wakes up, he has total amnesia; his memory loss has extended to language. In a crazy gesture of compassion, the doctor arranges for the man to be conveyed across war-torn Europe and home to Helsinki to be tended by a specialist. The doctor hopes that exposure to his homeland, its culture, and especially its language, will help the recovery of the man now called Sampo. They never see each other again.

Isolated and confused, Sampo, is given a bed in an empty visitors' ward of the hospital. The much awaited specialist never appears and Sampo never understands why. His closest friend is a tippling priest who teaches him Finnish through a reading of the Kalevala legends, libated with shots of Kosenkorva. He befriends some Russians who are housed briefly in his ward and he contemplates the hostilities between the nations. He wanders the city of Helsinki looking for triggers that may hand him back his identity – his past, a narrative. One of the nurses takes an interest in his case, shows him a special memory tree in a Helsinki park – and accepts his rejection of her affection with good grace. She is transferred to another place, but writes to him. He is unable to respond. She is angry.

In desperation Sampo joins the Finnish army and leaves for the eastern front. An epilogue tracks his demise and the doctor’s later discovery of his massive error. 

 

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