Summary:

Dr. McKechnie begins his overview of the history of the practice of medicine in British Columbia with records of Coastal Native practices encountered by the first explorers of the Northwest Territory in the 18th century. This opening section of the work contains interesting folklore regarding some of the methodologies and medicinals utilized, and terminates in descriptions of the rites surrounding the initiation of a new Shaman.

Moving forward in time, the author explores the early naval medicine of the seamen and their captains, including the early intermingling of the explorers with the Coastal Indians. The plagues of smallpox, measles, syphilis, and tuberculosis attributed to the arrival on the western continent of organisms to which the natives were not immune are covered briefly.

The third portion of the book is devoted to the changes in medical practice on this particular frontier as the emerging science of the 19th century moved gradually westward. The final chapters cover the century of the great world wars and the progressive advances in medical science as they affected the residents and physicians of British Columbia.

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A woman describes the male body, beginning with the torso--neck, chest, belly, genitals--then the appendages, the back, and finally the head. Her description features the appearance and uses of these anatomical parts from the perspective of female taste and needs. The essay is illustrated with strategically placed images of the human form in exotic settings, taken from Bernard Siegfried Albinus's remarkable treatise of anatomy of the mid-eighteenth century.

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This is a collection of 23 stories, five of which take the form of "letters" in which an older physician (not surprisingly, a surgeon) gives advice to an imaginary young surgeon. However, every one of the stories "fits" as a tale that might be told in such a letter--assuming the author was a wise and gifted writer, in addition to being a surgeon.

The book begins with the gift of a physical diagnosis textbook on the occasion of the young doctor's graduation ("Textbook") and ends with a reflection on "your first autopsy" ("Remains"). Among the other stories are Imelda (see annotation), Brute (see annotation), Toenails (see annotation), Mercy (see annotation), "A Pint of Blood," "Witness," "The Virgin and the Petri Dish," and "Impostor."

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The author comments initially that most physicians become involved in the stories of their patients' lives--as witnesses, chroniclers, and players. He uses as an example the story of a physician's role in the death of Anton P. Chekhov. Another interesting example is the book, A Fortunate Man (see this database), the story of an English country doctor who matures in the profession and comes to recognize the task of the doctor as one to help his patients feel recognized.

Dr. Verghese believes that all patients seen by physicians are in the midst of a story that begins the moment they walk through the portals of a hospital or a clinic. He sees the challenge as engaging the patient and the family in finding an "epiphany," even if that epiphany is simply the understanding that there is nothing more that can be done medically. In his conclusion he says that as physicians we should be ministers of healing, storytellers, storymakers, and players in the stories of our patients and ourselves.

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The author, Samuel Shem, opens these reflections by saying that he was a writer before he was a doctor. His early answers to questions about healing came from stories he read. "Life as it should be in addition to life as it is" became the "motor" of his writing. He loved stories that he heard from patients and the "few humane doctors" he met and decided he would be able to understand people better by writing about experiences with them.

Shem's experience as an intern spawned The House of God (see this database) and he sees writing about his training as an example of the use of resistance when he saw "something unjust, cruel, militaristic or simply not right." He recommends the following to resist the inhumanities in medicine: (1) Learn our trade in the world, (2) Beware of isolation, (3) Speak up, (4) Resist self-centeredness. He says that the healing essence of narrative is in "we," meaning the patient and the physician.

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The title The Body in the Library suggests medicine (the body) as seen through literary eyes. True enough, this collection of stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from longer works is subtitled "A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine." However, as Iain Bamforth points out in his introduction, nowadays we are more concerned with "the library in the body" (p. xxiv); that is, we believe the truth of human illness can be found by biochemical tests and positron scans, rather than by storytelling. In this anthology Bamforth uses literature itself to document this change in perspective. Beginning with "The Black Veil" (1836), an early sketch by Charles Dickens, Bamforth recounts the recent history of medicine as seen by poets and writers, many of whom were (and are) physicians themselves.

Part of the anthology consists of material already annotated in this database. This includes stories (e.g. Conan Doyle’s "The Curse of Eve" from Round the Red Lamp, Kafka’s A Country Doctor, and Williams’s Jean Beicke); excerpts from novels (e.g. "The Operation" from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, "The Fever Ward" from Camus’ The Plague, and "Doctor Glas" from Hjalmar Soderberg’s novel, Doctor Glas); and essays (e.g. Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and John Berger’s "Clerk of Their Records" from A Fortunate Man).

However, most of the selections have not previously been noted in this database, nor do they appear in other recent anthologies. Iain Bamforth has discovered some wonderful "new" material on the medical experience. This includes several poems by the German physician-poet Gottfried Benn (pp. 151-153); and a brief piece by neurologist-writer Alfred Döblin ("My Double," pp. 177-179), in which the physician Döblin and the writer Döblin describe their respective "doubles" in rather detached and negative terms.

Another delight is the series of selections from Miguel Torga’s diary (pp. 256-278); Torga (1907-1995) was a provincial Portuguese medical practitioner for 60 years. Among the other pieces are short excerpts from plays by Georg Buchner, Jules Romains, and Karl Valentin; and poems by Weldon Kees, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Dannie Abse, Robert Pinsky, Miroslav Holub , and Thom Gunn.

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Auden wrote this poem in memory of his own physician, Dr. David Protetch. He begins, "Most people believe / dying is something they do, / not their physician . . . " Auden, whose father was a physician, knows better. His father had warned him about doctors who are too aggressive or too concerned with money. Fortunately, he found a consultant who thought as his father did, perhaps because he (Dr. Protetch) had himself "been a victim / of medical engineers / and their arrogance, / when they atom-bombed / your sick pituitary / and over-killed it."

While prescribing for Auden’s minor complaints, Protetch himself was "mortally sick." Because of this, Auden felt that he could trust his doctor to tell him the truth about his medical condition: "if I were dying, / to say so, not insult me / with soothing fictions." Thus, Auden praises Protetch for having been, "what all / doctors should be, but few are . . . " [78 lines]

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How JFK Killed My Father is a collection of 52 poems by psychiatrist Richard Berlin. The book is divided into five sections--"Learning the Shapes," "Role Models," "Code Blue," "What a Psychiatrist Remembers," and "What I Love"--and these subtitles guide the reader through this physician's poignant journey from medical student to accomplished, and humbled, "healer, priest, turner of textbook pages, searcher, listener, arrogant crow consumed in white" ("If You Ask Me My Name").

Berlin's poems succeed because of strong imagery and the kind of internal "knowing" that only comes when one pays attention to the sights, sounds, and emotional nuances that occur in training, in practice, and in life. A musician as well as a doctor, Berlin sometimes uses jazz as a metaphor: in "Uncle Joe" he writes about "suffering's music" and in "Learning the Shapes" medical students practice examining patients until their fingers are as sensitive as a "blind bluesman" whose fingers can sense the right note "an instant before / touching a tight steel string."

Berlin "gets" the stress of med school and residency just right in "Sunday Parade" and "January Thaw"; as his poems retrace his path from student to practicing psychiatrist, he transmits the deepening of both experience and empathy in the same right-on way: "What I Revealed," "Places We Have Met," "What a Dying Woman Saw," "Transference," "What a Psychiatrist Remembers," "What Makes a Psychiatrist Cry," "Our Medical Marriage," and "What I Love" stand out as examples. The poems in this collection are personal, eloquent, straightforward and well crafted; they move effortlessly between body, mind, and spirit.

A reader could open this collection to any poem and be captivated, but for full impact this collection is best read from beginning to end. Medical students, especially, might welcome this volume as a guide along their way.

(Some of the poems here also appear in Berlin's chapbook, Code Blue, which is annotated in this database.)

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Physician, poet, artist, parent, astute observer of his environment, Dr. Schneiderman gives us a wide vision of the things that inform his personal world. This collection of poems and pen and ink sketches spans almost four decades of its creator's life and life experiences. The author has collated his work around nine key foci, roughly but not totally, temporal in sequence. Through his eyes we meet his history related to New York City, his profound love for and attachment to his beloved wife and son, his humbleness before the labors of his chosen profession and the persons he meets in this context, and, finally, his tributes to the bravery of the men and women who responded to the horrendous assault of 9/11/01 upon his birthplace, the Great City.

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Subtitled "The Story of a Gifted Young Obstetrician's Mistake and the Psychologist Who Helped Her," this is an absorbing account of a young female physician's torment following the difficult delivery of a baby who was soon thereafter diagnosed with cerebral palsy. "Doctor Amelia" seeks counseling after she has taken an indefinite leave of absence from her practice and faculty position. The book intertwines reconstructed counseling sessions in the voice of the doctor-patient, with the therapeutic strategy and personal reflections of her therapist, author Dan Shapiro.

The obstetrician enters therapy because she has lost confidence in her professional abilities. Once deeply engaged in her chosen profession, she has lost her enthusiasm for it and feels "numb." Her marriage is under strain. When asked if she is suicidal, she hesitates and then denies she is. Shapiro thinks there may be trouble ahead, and so does the reader. Gradually, Doctor Amelia reveals the incident that triggered her changed emotional state. She had delayed performing a cesarean section on a patient who was in extended labor and whose baby was showing deceleration of its heartbeat rate. A few weeks later, the baby's pediatrician informed Doctor Amelia that the baby had cerebral palsy and now the baby's parents are filing a lawsuit.

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