Summary:

Anne (Sarah Polley) is 23 years old, is married with two small daughters, lives in a trailer in her mother’s yard, and works as a nightshift cleaner. She is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer and told she has no more than three months to live. She decides to tell no one that she is dying and makes a list of things to do in the time she has left.

She records birthday messages for her daughters, looks for a new wife for her husband (Scott Speedman), explores her troubled relationship with her mother (Deborah Harry), and has an affair with a man she meets in a laundromat (Mark Ruffalo). The last stages of her illness and her death are not shown; the focus is on how she chooses to live a life that has a new shape, both curtailed and illuminated by the knowledge of how soon it will end.

View full annotation

Summary:

Sitting around the dinner table one evening, the Toumeville family receives news that the Marquis de Fumerol, Mrs. Toumeville’s brother, is dying. The Marquis squandered his money and reputation on a series of loose women; as a consequence, he has not seen his sister in years. Nevertheless, the Toumevilles leave immediately for his bedside in fear that the Marquis will die without having reunited with God. The Toumevilles are not so much concerned with the Marquis’ eternal life as with the possibility that the "freethinkers" and socialists will make the Marquis a hero for turning his back on the morality of the aristocracy.

The Marquis receives his nephew kindly, but when the priest enters he flies into a rage. The priest is forced to retreat. While the family is considering another plan of attack, they hear screams from the sick man’s room. A Protestant clergyman had entered and the Marquis grew so angry that he collapsed. His nephew thinks he is dead. His mother and the priest, however, act as though he is still alive. The priest administers extreme unction and Mrs. Toumeville cries out that her brother has squeezed her hand, recognizing her and accepting religion.

View full annotation

Summary:

Jordan, an 18-year-old athlete, finds his joints weak and begins to stumble unaccountably. The local doctor who has known him all his life sends him to the Mayo clinic where a diagnosis of Lou Gherig’s disease is confirmed. His mother, three brothers, sister, and brother-in-law (an Episcopalian priest) accommodate to his illness, with its promise of early death, in various ways.

The family is supportive, though the youngest brother goes through weeks of denial that look like rejection before he allows himself to feel the emotional impact. Jordan’s adored girlfriend can’t rise to the challenge of loving a boy with no future, and distances herself, but leaves it up to him to acknowledge and effect a separation that leaves her free to pursue other relationships, and him to burrow deeper into the loving family that sustains him in his final months. He takes one last trip to the Colorado mountains with his younger brother where they meet an old mountaineer who senses immediately what might be happening and becomes for Jordan the type and figure of the wise old man.

Here as in other stories of this kind, time seems to conflate for the young person facing death; maturity comes in sudden leaps, and a certain calm descends before the end. One of Jordan’s final acts is to serve as godfather at the baptism of his sister’s baby, his namesake. The act and the letter he writes the child gives him a sense of leaving behind a legacy that matters.

View full annotation

Summary:

In the videotape, She's Finally Free . . ., Joe Cruzan and Christy Cruzan White, Nancy Cruzan's father and sister, tell the story of their eight-year struggle for the right to let Nancy die, after a January 11, 1983 car wreck left her in a persistent vegetative state. The Cruzans see their story as a means of enlightening health care professionals and the community at large about the concerns and frustrations experienced by the families of critically ill patients. After a brief pictorial overview of Nancy Cruzan's life, the remainder of the video presents a chronological series of vignettes/stories told by Christy and Joe Cruzan.

View full annotation

Summary:

Brilliant, liberated Iris Murdoch (Kate Winslet/Judi Dench) captures the utter devotion of awkward John Bayley (Hugh Bonneville/Jim Broadbent), whom she inexplicably chooses to be her life partner. The film transfers often between their earliest adventures as students, when Murdoch reveled in shocking the more conventional young man--to stages in the inexorable deterioration of her mind and Bayley’s attempts to keep her going as a writer and a human being.

Memorable scenes include Bayley’s continued admiration of the mature woman’s brilliance, his midnight rage against their lot, and underwater swimming that contrasts nubile daring youth with clumsy, terrified age. In the final minutes, Iris is left in a light-filled institution with kind attendants; her death is hidden. The viewer realizes that this is his tale, not hers.

View full annotation

Summary:

This anthology frames a rich selection of fiction and nonfiction with astute and helpful introductions to issues in nineteenth-century medicine and the larger culture in which it participated. The fiction is comprised of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Steel Windpipe in its entirety; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, "The Doctors of Hoyland" from Round the Red Lamp; and selections from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, W. Somserset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, George Moore’s Esther Waters, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, and Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne [the full-length versions of many of the above have been annotated in this database]. The nonfiction consists of two versions of the Hippocratic Oath, two American Medical Association statements of ethics, and selections from Daniel W. Cathell’s The Physician Himself (1905).

View full annotation

Summary:

Life on the Line relates the experience of 228 writers who express in their work the deep connection between healing and words. Walker and Roffman have organized their anthology into eight topical chapters: Abuse, Death and Dying, Illness, Relationships, Memory, Rituals and Remedies, White Flags From Silent Camps, and a chapter of poems about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. This hefty volume contains a very broad selection of contemporary poems, stories, and essays by both well-known and relatively unknown writers on the experience of illness and healing.

View full annotation

Summary:

This is a harrowing story, told in the first person, of an obsession with food and body image. "One day I will be thin enough", says Josie, the 25 year old anorectic woman who has been hospitalized for life-threatening self-starvation. "Just the bones, . . . the pure, clear shape of me." "One day I will be pure consciousness." The narration spins out in painful detail the pattern of compulsive behavior which pervades Josie’s existence. Her pitifully barren emotional life is revealed as well.

How did it all begin? Flashbacks of significant events invade Josie’s attempts to stop thinking. A shy, awkward adolescent, overly sensitive to casual comments about excess flesh, decides to diet. Josie stumbles non-communicatively through a teen-age sexual initiation to a later affair with her married professor, retreating ever further from her bewildered family.

But why do events take such an extreme turn? The mystery of anorexia nervosa remains. In the hospital, a nurse who has seen everything seems to strike some responsive cord, and Josie begins eating to gain weight. At the end of the novel she’ll soon be released , under supervision, but the outcome is in doubt. "Can I learn to be so present? Can I learn to be so full?" ". . . if I were a body, what would I be?"

 

View full annotation

Summary:

In "Life Support," a mother must make a difficult decision: whether or not to consent to heart surgery without anesthesia for her critically ill newborn who is on a ventilator. Her instincts and reason contradict each other, and she isn’t sure which to believe. She wants to let the child die naturally in her arms, but this will not be allowed in this particular institution. She feels distant from her husband and from the doctors, and believes that her sudden transformation into the guardian of this child presumes far more knowledge and ability than she possesses.

View full annotation

Summary:

A theatre classic about a dysfunctional family, whose summer on the shore is flawed by alcohol, tuberculosis, drug addiction, and denial of all of the above. Considered by biographers to be highly autobiographical, the plot of the play centers about the progressive retreat by wife and mother into drugs as her husband and sons pretend they do not see. Alcohol abuse among the men of the family contributes to the rising tension in the work, as does increasing concern about one son’s tuberculosis. The action and psychological power of the play accelerate steadily through the first three acts, then climax with recognition of the brutal realities in the final act.

View full annotation