Summary:

In a future society in which biological reproduction is restricted and humanoid robots ("Mechas") are routinely manufactured to supplement the economic and social needs of humans ("Orgas"), Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) creates a prototype child Mecha, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has "neuronal feedback," the ability to love, and "an inner world of metaphor, self-motivated reasoning," imagination, and dreams. David is given to Henry and Monica, a couple whose biological child Martin is incurably ill and cryopreserved, awaiting a future cure.

More specifically, David is created out of Hobby's own loss and given to aid Monica's mourning for Martin, whom she has been unable to "let go" of as dead. It is thus Monica (Frances O'Connor) who must make the decision to perform the "imprint protocol" that will make David love her. After she stops resisting the desire to love a child (of any kind) again and implements the protocol, Martin is unexpectedly cured and comes home.

The ensuing turmoil sends David, accompanied by a robot Teddy bear, out into a nightmare world of adult Mechas, comprised of both Rouge City, where functioning Mechas like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) do their sex worker jobs and also the fugitive realm where unregistered, discarded Mechas try to find the spare parts they need to rebuild themselves and elude trappers who take them to reactionary "Flesh Fairs" where they are publicly destroyed as an expression of rage against artificial technologies.

Joe and David, both set up and betrayed by humans jealous of their superiority at performing human functions, join together on a quest to make David "real" and return him to Monica. The quest takes them to a partly submerged Manhattan and sends David and Teddy two thousand years into the future to resolve the dystopic narrative.

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In this film based on a true story, Ramón Sampedro (Javier Barden), a young fisherman from the northwest coast of Spain, is injured in a diving accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down and completely dependent for his care on his older brother and his sister-in-law, who make numerous sacrifices in order to care for him. Twenty-seven years later, in his 50's, Ramón is weary of his life, which he feels is without dignity, and he tries to get legal permission to end it.

His brother is adamantly opposed to euthanasia, but Ramón is comforted and aided in his quest by two women who are drawn into his circle. Julia (Bélen Rueda), a lawyer suffering from a degenerative disease, begins to design a legal case for Ramón but soon falls in love with him (although she seems happily married), and he with her. In a particularly moving scene, Ramón-who of course cannot move--tells Julia that her smell is the beginning of his erotic fantasies about her.

Julia helps him edit and publish a book of his poetry, but then, having agreed to a joint suicide, she mysteriously backs out. Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a young single mother who works in a fish-packing factory and who has had a hard life, also falls in love with Ramón. For some time she tries to change his mind, arguing that his example has inspired her and saved her from a life of despair. Ramón challenges her: "The person who truly loves me will be the one who helps me [commit suicide]."

When Ramón's legal appeal (for the same rights the nondisabled have to end their lives) is lost on a technicality, he seems to have nowhere to turn, but Rosa, converted by her love for Ramón, finally agrees to help him die. He achieves his goal in a videotaped end in which he argues that what he is doing is his right and that no others should be blamed or prosecuted for it, sips poison through a straw, and dies.

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Veneta Masson's latest poetry collection is a clinician's guide not to illness and disease but to the souls touched by illness, both the patient's and the caregiver's. In 45 poems, she reviews her life in caregiving, from her early days in nursing to her work as a nurse practitioner in a community clinic and finally to her decision to use her hands "to write and to bless" (p. 93). Her poems are enhanced by the artwork of Rachel Dickerson, whose woodcuts and etchings are paired with poems to provide another voice, another way of looking into the soul of caregiving. For an example of this wonderful pairing, see the print that accompanies "The Screamer in Room 4" (p. 24). The print allows us to see the frustration of the screaming child, the child's mother, and the caregiver.

As always, Masson's poems center on the patient-caregiver experience; in this volume, as we follow her through her various adventures in nursing we also travel with her through the changes she has witnessed in healthcare and the politics that continue to affect its delivery. "Rx" (p. 22) examines Medicare and Medicaid and the political decisions that often deny medications to the elderly who need them most. "Gold Standard" (p.34) looks again at medicine and money, juxtaposing the medical pill against the placebo of the caring healer. One of my favorite poems, "The Doctor's Laptop" (p. 40) laments how technology might deprive patients of the doctor's time, attention and touch.

Other themes that are central to this collection are the unexpected presence of humor in caregiving (see "Conga! at the Rio," page 50), of spirituality (see especially "Rescue," page 36, "Refuge," page 45, and "Prevention," page 82), and of the personal. In several moving poems Masson looks at her own sister's death and her reaction to it, writing about her conflicting roles as sister and nurse (see, among others, "Matinee," "Hilda and Snow White," and "The Nurse's Job," pages 70, 72 and 74). In an excellent final poem, "Winter Count," Masson takes us through her own nursing history, a chronicle of work, joy, disappointment and survival that any caregiver will recognize.

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The novel opens with a young surgical nurse, Justine Brent, nursing a mill worker whose arm has been mangled by a carding machine. She soon meets John Amherst, the mill’s assistant manager who works passionately to reform the dangerous conditions at the mill and to improve the living conditions of the workers. Amherst recognizes Justine’s intelligence and sympathy, but he quickly forgets about her when he meets and falls in love with the new mill owner, Bessy Langhope.

The narrative skips ahead three years. John Amherst has learned that his now-wife Bessy has no real interest in his plan to reform the mill, although she initially appeared to be moved by the workers’ misery. In fact, her insistence on luxury, which is funded by the profit from the mills, thwarts his desire to use her controlling interest to make significant changes. The couple encounters Justine, who knew Bessy in school. When the somewhat sickly Bessy invites her to be a private nurse to herself and her stepdaughter, Justine, who is exhausted from “difficult cases,” accepts. Justine attempts to shore up John and Bessy’s increasingly troubled marriage without success. When John is abroad, Bessy has an accident while riding her horse. Paralyzed, in constant pain, and slowly dying, Bessy is attended by a physician who advances his career with the technological feat of keeping Bessy alive, ostensibly until her husband and her father arrive to say their goodbyes. When Bessy begs Justine to let her die, Justine secretly gives her a fatal dose of morphine, an act that the physician suspects.

The narrative skips ahead again to over a year later when Amherst, who has inherited the mills from Bessy, invites her family to celebrate the opening of an emergency hospital he has built in the mill town. Justine, who had stayed on after Bessy’s death as her stepdaughter’s nurse, and Amherst become reacquainted. Their shared social and intellectual interests develop into love, and they marry. The physician who had cared for Bessy and who had, earlier, asked Justine to marry him, had developed an addiction, one that had begun while he was treating Bessy. Beginning to sink into financial ruin, he blackmails Justine. Eventually, Amherst finds out that Justine killed Bessie with morphine and, horrified, rejects her.

Justine confesses her act to Bessy’s father and negotiates a deal: She will remove herself from their lives if he allows Amherst to continue his work at the mills. Bessy’s father accepts the deal, and Justine disappears for many months until Bessy’s daughter becomes ill and begs to be reunited with Justine. A family friend explains to Amherst Justine’s arrangement to protect him and convinces him that she has suffered suitable penance. Justine is reunited with Amherst when he celebrates the opening of a gymnasium for the mill workers, a project he credits Bessy with having designed. Justine, who knows that Bessy had in fact designed the gymnasium for her private estate, a project that would have drained the funds for improving the mills, keeps silent and subverts her knowledge to her husband’s perception of the facts.

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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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Sophie, who has lived with her aunt in Haiti for the 12 years since her birth is being sent to live with her mother in New York. She leaves her aunt and grandmother amid a riot at the airport, and arrives in New York to meet her mother and her mother's long-term lover. Her mother has frequent nightmares, related, as it turns out, to the rape that eventuated in the birth of Sophie. Sophie's mother insists that the only road out of poverty is to study hard; she wants Sophie to become a doctor, and jealously oversees her work and protects her virginity, frequently testing her to make sure she has not been sexually active.

Eventually Sophie elopes with a kind musician, Joseph, but finds herself unable to enjoy sex. She returns to Haiti with their baby while he is on tour, and finds refuge among the women who raised her, though they themselves suffer various effects of poverty, alcohol, and violence. Sophie's mother flies to Haiti to be reconciled with her and takes her back to New York where the two women and their partners briefly share peace and kindness. But when Sophie's mother finds she is pregnant, she begins to have the nightmares about rape again, and kills herself. Sophie and the mother's lover fly to Haiti for the burial. Sophie runs away from the gravesite into the fields where her mother was raped, and attacks the cane stalks in fury, frustration, and a final cathartic gesture of self-liberation from a painful past.

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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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The most famous European visitation of plague was the fourteenth-century epidemic often called the Black Death. But plague recurred in waves for many centuries. In the seventeenth century, Italy suffered several devastating outbreaks. Fairly accurate estimates of the losses during that period are available through extant records. For example, in 1656, over 100,000 people died of plague in Naples. Strange to imagine, this carnage coincided with the religious Counter Reformation and the extraordinary artistic output of the Baroque.

This intriguing collection of essays analyzes the effect of plague on painting, and assesses the utility of artwork as a source for the religious and social history. The essays concentrate on the cities that suffered major epidemics, such as Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, and Venice, and on portrayals of particular "plague saints," such St Roch, St Sebastien, St Carlo Borromeo, St Rosalie of Palermo and St Luigi Gonzaga. The artists include Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Crespi, Sweets, Canaletto, and Van Dyck.

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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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