How Can I Help? A Week in My Life as a Psychiatrist

Bryden, Pier; Goldbloom, David

Last Updated: Feb-20-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Summary:

The narrator tracks a hypothetical week in the life and work of a psychiatrist in a major Canadian hospital through the stories of individual patients, some of whom were willing to be identified by name.

The book opens with “they are us” and the shocking discovery that a patient whose life has been ruined by mental illness is a medical school classmate.

Other patients have been followed for many years—a woman with eating disorder, a man with bipolar disease, another with schizophrenia. A new patient with intractable depression finally agrees to electroshock therapy, and the first treatment is described. The painful duty of making an involuntary admission pales in contrast to the devastation of losing a patient to suicide.

Goldbloom’s personal life, opinions, and worries are woven throughout with frank honesty. His mother’s metastatic brain tumor sparks the associated intimations of his own advancing age and mortality. His genuine fascination with and appreciation of the effective modalities now available are matched by his frustration over how they are beyond reach of far too many because of the stigma that is still attached to mental illness and the lack of resources and political will to make them available.

View full annotation

Human Voices Wake Us

Winakur, Jerald

Last Updated: Feb-06-2018

Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The 55 poems in Human Voices Wake Us fall primarily into 3 categories: biographical poems, poems about the natural world, and poems about the worldly travels and travails of a man learning and practicing medicine. As I began to read this book, I started checking off all the poems that I thought might merit comment, but stopped early on since almost all called to me--each in their own voice. Thankfully—and skillfully--the poems were often placed in ways that, although drawing from the different aspects of the author’s life, they complemented each other. For example, “The Tyranny of Aging,” a poem about caring for a half paralyzed 95 year old whose last living child has died, is followed by “Redbud,” where the speaker of the poem walks “the ravines, the treed/windbreaks, the creek bottom/all the wooded places//searching for redbuds” (p.49). Another example is the poem “Shock and Awe in Comfort, Texas,” where a solitary walker confronts dive-bombing dragonflies and birds of prey doing what they need to do to stay alive followed by “What I Remember in Embryology,” a poem about being created and born: “Tethered/we are all waiting/fetuses suckling/our way//to heart and hair/teeth and bone/reaching grasping/limb buds into fingers” (p.25). Winakur came to poetry after realizing that "coming and going in the rooms on daily rounds was not enough to sustain a life"(xiv). What the reader experiences in this book is Winakur’s inspired attempt of seeking—and then delivering through poetry-- more.

View full annotation

Patiently Waiting For…

Nisker, Jeffrey

Last Updated: Jan-17-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

An artist, Ruth, lives with quadriplegia and manages to drive (and dance) with a special wheelchair that she controls with her chin. She also enjoys terrorizing doctors in the hospital corridors, where she is seen on a regular basis because of frequent bouts of infected bedsores. She has a new computer and is “patiently waiting for” a biomedical engineer to set it up to manage, like her chair, with her chin. She wants to write, to draw, to create. But the wait list is long, technicians scarce, and every candidate deserving.

On one of her admissions, Ruth meets the physician-narrator who is appalled by a medical resident’s lack of empathy in relating her case as if she were not present. Distressed by the encounter, the doctor is all the more disturbed when he notices that Ruth’s birth date is the same as his own.

He tries to make it up to her by withdrawing from her care in order to be her “friend,” one who tries to understand and will defend her strong desire to live despite her disability. Driven by curiosity about her past, her sharp wit, and how she faces each day, the doctor never quite achieves his goal and constantly feels guilty for letting her down as an advocate and a friend, and possibly also for being able-bodied himself. He never visited her in her group home, and when she comes to hospital in florid sepsis, he is unable to prevent his colleagues from letting nature take its course. His own bout with severe illness, possibly MS—more likely a stroke--resonates with Ruth’s plight. Long after her death, he can imagine the acid remarks that she would make about his foibles.

View full annotation

Sutton's Law

Wright, Linda; Orient, Jane

Last Updated: Jan-05-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Intern, Maggie Altman, begins her postgraduate training in a large Texas hospital where a new computerized system has been implemented to improve service. She pours heart and soul into her work, but her admissions always seem to be the sickest patients who keep dying, sometimes inexplicably. Maggie becomes suspicious of her colleagues and of Dr. Milton Silber, an irrascible, retired clinician with no fondness for the new technology. Silber also happens to be a financial genius. Overhearing conversations and finding puzzling papers, Maggie imagines a scam, in which her supervisors may be eliminating dying patients to reduce costs, improve statistics, and siphon funds to their own pockets.

The bad outcomes for Maggie's patients are noticed and criticized, and she is pressured to drop out, switch hospitals, or go back into research. She senses that the perpetrators are aware of her suspicions and send her the worst patients in an effort to eliminate her. She trusts no one. These worries are compounded by her own illness and her accidental discovery in the morgue of a traffic in unclaimed bodies. With the help of excellent clinical skills, true friends, Dr. Silber, and a new love interest who is a budding financial genius, she survives physical and emotional violence and solves the mystery of patient homicides, poisonings, and fraud.

View full annotation

The Children Act

McEwan, Ian

Last Updated: Jan-05-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Approaching age 60 and childless, Fiona Maye is a family court judge who must decide if 17 year-old Adam has the right to refuse blood transfusions for his leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Children Act does not allow a child to make this decision until age 18. Fiona is an atheist and her 35-year marriage to an academic is falling apart. She takes the extraordinary step of visiting Adam to know him and understand his conviction. He is beautiful and gifted, he writes poetry and plays violin. Why would he not want to try to live? She makes her decision having no idea if it will be morally, legally or medically right. To say more would spoil it.

View full annotation

The Anatomist's Apprentice

Harris, Tessa

Last Updated: Jan-05-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In 1780, Thomas Silkstone, a young American surgeon and anatomist, is invited by Lydia to establish the cause of death of her brother, Lord Crick, a dissolute who held the Oxfordshire estate that she will inherit. Her goal is to absolve her husband of the suspicion of murder; however, as the investigation proceeds, it increasingly seems that her husband is guilty after all.

The earnest young doctor methodically examines each new lead—performing experiments on tissues and with various poisons in his effort to determine the cause of death – and in so doing solve a murder. Before long, another person is dead and Thomas is in love with Lydia, a scarcely concealed complication that calls his testimony into question.

View full annotation

Hope and Grace: Spiritual Experiences in Severe Distress, Illness, and Dying

Renz, Monika

Last Updated: Dec-14-2017

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Dr. Monika Renz’s work with dying patients is unusual if not unique in the way she appropriates and applies insights from Jungian depth psychology, practices available in patients’ faith traditions, and musically guided meditation to invite and support the spiritual experiences that so often come, bidden or unbidden, near the end of life. An experienced oncologist, Dr. Renz offers carefully amassed data to support her advocacy of focused practices of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care, but is also quite comfortable with the fact that “neither the frequency nor the visible effects of experiences of the transcendent prove that such experience is an expression of grace” because “unverifiability is intrinsic to grace.” Still, her long experience leads her to assert not only that “grace” can be a useful, practical, operative word for what professional caregivers may witness and mediate but also that affirmation and support of patients’ spiritual, religious, or transcendent experiences in the course of dying can amplify and multiply moments of grace, which manifest as sudden, deep peace in the very midst of pain, profound acceptance, openness to reconciliations, or significant awakenings from torpor that allow needed moments of closure with loved ones. Describing herself as “an open-minded religious person and a practicing Christian,” she reminds readers that God is a loanword, whose basic form in Germanic was gaudam, a neutral participle. Depending on the Indo-Germanic root, the word means “the called upon” or “the one sacrificed to . . . .” Openness to the divine in both patients and caregivers, Dr. Renz argues, can and does make end-of-life care a shared journey of discovery and offer everyone involved a valuable reminder that medicine is practiced, always, at the threshold of mystery.

View full annotation

Slow Medicine: The Way of Healing

Sweet, Victoria

Last Updated: Dec-13-2017

Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Victoria Sweet describes her training in medical school, residency, and work in various clinics and hospitals. From all of these she forms her own sense of what medical care should include: “Slow Medicine” that uses, ironically, the best aspects of today’s “Fast” medicine.

Her dramatic “Introduction: Medicine Without a Soul” describes poor—even dangerous—care given to her elderly father at a hospital. An experienced physician, she calls Hospice and saves him from a “Death Express” the hospital has “quality-assured” (pp. 6, 8).

The book continues with 16 chapters in chronological order. The first ten describe Sweet from a late ‘60s Stanford undergrad and “a sort of hippie” (p.14), next a learner of “facts” in preclinical studies at Harvard, plus the clinical rotations (including Psychiatry, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and electives), then an internship as a doctor and her work in various clinics and hospitals. Throughout she’s collecting skills, concepts, even philosophies (Jung, feminism, Chinese chi, value of stories). She also describes particular patients important to her learning. She dislikes “just good enough” medicine at the VA (p. 95), “unapologetic budgetarianism” (p 141), medicine that is reductive and uncaring, and futile care for dying patients.

Halfway through, we find an “Intermission: In which Fast Medicine and Slow Medicine Come Together.” With a year off, Sweet signs on as physician for a trekking group headed for Nepal. Unexpectedly, she treats an Englishman in the Himalayas. Returning home, she treats a man whose pulse is declining and rides a helicopter with him to a hospital. She realizes that she can take on the full responsibility of being a doctor, including when to use Fast medicine and when to use Slow.

The following chapters deal with the 1980s emergence of AIDS, a hand injury to Sweet (she sees herself as “a wounded healer,” p. 182), her new understanding of medicine as “A Craft, A Science, and an Art” (Chapter 12) and conflicts between medical care and economics-driven medicine (“checked boxes,” administrators, quality assurance, even outright corruption). She scorns use of the labels “health-care providers” and “health-care consumers” (p. 211) and discovers Hildegard of Bingen’s medieval vision of medicine. She works for 20 years at Laguna Honda, the topic of her earlier book God’s Hotel (2012). Chapter 16 closes the book with “A Slow Medicine Manifesto.”

Sweet pays tribute to her teachers, both in a dedication to the book, and throughout the pages: professors, preceptors, nurses—especially a series of Irish Kathleens—and patients. There are some 20 case studies of patients throughout the book, their medical dilemmas, their personalities, and Sweet’s Slow Medicine that involves creating a healing relationship with them, finding the right path for treatment, even watching and waiting.

View full annotation

Second Bloom

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Dec-05-2017

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine

Chin, Eliza Lo

Last Updated: Nov-09-2017

Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

This Side of Doctoring is an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In 344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers," "Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the 146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay from a mother and daughter, both physicians. Beginning with the first American female physicians in the mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school, residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass, Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a few.

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage; children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos; mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying); the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334). The anthology also touches on how women have changed the practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to practice in the traditional way" (page 185) The authors write about the wisdom of setting limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman; and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally confronting an American man becoming a doctor.
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding one’s identity in the field. Implicit in most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul". Several authors discover that female physicians have unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151)

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader, resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors (which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

View full annotation