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Dr. Marina Singh, a pharmacologist and former obstetrician, is sent to a research site in the Amazonian jungle somewhere in Brazil that is operated by the company she works for, Vogel Pharmaceutical. The company chief executive officer, Mr. Fox, dispatches her there to check on the progress of the research and to get details on the reported death of her colleague, Dr. Anders Eckman, while he was there on a previous research trip. Eckman’s wife, uncertain that he was dead, asks Marina to find out what had happened to her husband. The plot centers on Marina’s dual missions at the Amazon jungle site. 

Marina’s trip reunites her with the legendary and imperious Dr. Annick Swenson, who is an obstetrician and the lead researcher at the site. Thirteen years before, Swenson was Marina’s supervisor during her obstetrics residency. A mistake Marina makes while she’s delivering a baby after disregarding Swenson’s advice drove her out of obstetrics and into pharmacology, and then eventually to Vogel. The company is supporting Swenson’s research hoping it will produce a blockbuster product. Mr. Fox is growing impatient having received only brief and vague communications from Swenson over the past five years.  

Decades earlier Swenson had followed her mentor to the jungle location where the Lakashi tribe lives, and after frequent visits over this time, resided there permanently to work on the research Vogel was funding. The research was based on observations Swenson and her mentor made about Lakashi women; they never go through menopause and they are fertile into their old age. Swenson’s project is to find out why, and provide the information to Vogel in order to develop a product that could give women the option to avoid menopause and to have babies much later in life. 

Swenson finds it is the bark of the (fictional) Martin trees when combined with excretions of the (fictional) Purple Martinet moth deposited in the bark Lakashi women ingest that extends their fertility after menopause. Trying it herself, Swenson becomes pregnant at age seventy–three. She also finds that the same bark protects the Lakashi women against malaria. Swenson eventually concludes that her research should not proceed to product development for fertility, but instead for prevention of malaria. Certain that no American pharmaceutical company would “foot the bill for Third World do-gooding,” Swenson decides to reallocate the fertility research funding to her malaria vaccine work without permission from the company (p. 289). A cat and mouse game ensues around the research funding, Swenson’s pregnancy ends, and the mystery of what happened to Anders Eckman is solved. Marina Singh’s life is changed, probably forever.

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In The Farewell, we follow Billi, a young Asian-American woman, as she takes an unplanned trip from New York to Changchun, China, to visit her grandmother—perhaps for the last time. Billi has just found out that her grandmother (Nai Nai) has lung cancer, stage IV. The doctor gives her three months to live. As troubling as such a diagnosis already is, the situation is further complicated by the family’s choice to lie about the truth of Nai Nai’s illness to her. Now, Billi’s family gathers to see Nai Nai under the pretense of a wedding, but the festivities can barely conceal a heartfelt and heart-wrenching struggle over familial responsibility, filial piety, and whether Nai Nai deserves to know.

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Sunita Puri, a palliative care attending physician, educates and illuminates the reader about how conversations about end of life goals can improve quality of life, not just quality of dying, in her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. Thirteen chapters are grouped in three parts: Between Two Dark Skies, The Unlearning and Infinity in a Seashell. The arc of the book follows Puri as she is raised by her anesthesiologist mother and engineer father – both immigrants from India – Puri’s decision to enter medical school, her choice of internal medicine residency followed by a palliative care fellowship in northern California and her return to practice in southern California where her parents and brother live. Besides learning about the process of becoming a palliative care physician, the reader also learns of Puri’s family’s deep ties to spirituality and faith, the importance of family and extended family, and her family’s cultural practices.

Puri writes extensively about patients and their families, as well as her mentors and colleagues. She plans and rehearses the difficult conversations she will have with patients in the same way a proceduralist plans and prepares for an intervention. She provides extensive quotes from conversations and analyzes where conversations go awry and how she decides whether to proceed down a planned path or improvise based on the language and body language of her patients and their family members. We visit patients in clinic, in hospital, and at home, and at all stages of Puri’s training and initial practice. Some of the most charged conversations are with colleagues, who, for example, ask for a palliative care consultation but want to limit that conversation to a single focus, such as pain management. We also learn of the differences between palliative care and hospice, and the particularly fraught associations many have with the latter term. She feels insulted when patients or families vent by calling her names such as “Grim Reaper” or “human killer” (p. 232), but understands that such words mean that more education is needed to help people understand what a palliative care physician can do. 

As a mediator of extremely difficult conversations, where emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, helplessness and anger can swirl with love and gratitude, Puri finds the grace to acknowledge that all such emotions are part of the feelings of loss and impending grief, and to beautifully render her reflections on these intimacies: “Yet although I am seeing a patient because I have agreed that they are approaching death, if I do my job well, what I actually encounter is the full force of their lives.” (p. 206) Having met many dying people she notes: “Dying hasn’t bestowed upon them the meaning of life or turned them into embodiments of enlightenment; dying is simply a continuation of living this messy, temporary life, humanly and imperfectly.” (pp 221-2) 

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The subtitle of this collection explicitly states its purpose and implies its audience. The content includes essays on teaching, as well as a number of canonical stories taught in medical humanities courses. The first section consists of key texts that present a rationale for teaching narrative literature to medical and other health professions students. This is followed by five sections, each of which covers an aspect of that rationale, i.e. narrative exploration of  professional boundaries, empathy and respect, authority and duty, stigma, and truth-telling and communication.  

Within each section, several essays describe teaching considerations or techniques, often focusing on a specific story or novel. For example, in “A Novel Approach to Narrative Based Professionalism: The Literature Classroom in Medical Education” by Pamela Schaff and Erika Wright (p. 72), the authors describe how Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration stimulates discussion of doctor-patient antipathy, doctor-patient intimacy, and interprofessional communication. From Reading to Healing also includes the full text of many stories relevant to the essays; for example, “Toenails” (Richard Selzer),“The Most Beautiful Woman in Town” (Charles Bukowski), “The Speckled Rash” (Mikhail Bulgakov), “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (Leo Tolstoy), “The Use of Force” (William Carlos Williams) and “The Birthmark” (Nathaniel Hawthorne).   

In addition to stories and novels, From Reading to Healing presents essays on teaching with film, religious literature, and even comics, cf. “Assisting Students in the Creation of a Class Oath Using Comics,” by Michael Redinger, Cheryl Dickson, and Elizabeth Lorbeer (p. 217)

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Beth Macy has been a newspaper reporter in the Roanoke, Virginia area for three decades. In this book, she provides extensive reporting on the opioid crisis, how it developed and wreaked havoc in Appalachia, and how it grew into a national crisis across the United States.  

As a result, not long after a person is addicted to opioids, drug seeking behaviors are not motivated by the urge for the next and best high, but instead are driven “to avoid dopesickness at any cost” (p. 9). 

Macy divides her reporting into three major parts: 1) the ways Purdue Pharma fueled the explosion of opioid addiction beginning with the introduction of its product Oxycontin in 1996; 2) the ways in which people get addicted to opioids and how they get their supplies; and 3) the ways the U.S. health care system, criminal justice system, Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies have failed in preventing and fixing the addiction crisis.  

As a journalist, Macy weaves the stories of individuals into the larger story of the opioid addiction crisis: people who became addicted to opioids and the effect it had on their families, and the stories of health care professionals who pulled alarms about the rapidly rising rate of opioid addiction and tried as best they could to treat addicted patients and protect the public. We read about the Purdue Pharma executives who were blamed and prosecuted for the marketing campaigns that turned localized opioid addiction patterns into a national opioid addiction epidemic. And we read about individual sheriffs, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and community activists who were trying to stem the tide of addition and death. These stories intersect throughout the book.

Embedded among the individual story lines are digressions Macy uses to elaborate on certain aspects of the opioid addiction crisis. She provides historical perspectives on drug addiction, and how this crisis differs from those of the past. She puts an emphasis on how trends in medical practice to liberalize the use of opioids in the management of all types of pain—minor and major, acute and chronic—converged with Purdue Pharma marketing campaigns for its proprietary opioid products. She cites statistics to show how fast the epidemic was worsening, how widely it was spreading across the United States, and how deadly it had become with mortality rates exceeding those of AIDs mortality at its peak. Other digressions cover how illicit opioid supply chains are created and maintained, and how different levels of governments reacted to the crisis. 

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The world is a big place – 7.4 billion people and counting. As much as we all enjoy the game of finding our doppelganger in a crowd, there probably isn’t anyone in the world who is exactly like us. With a genetic code of over 3 billion base pairs, of which there are innumerable permutations, we would be hard pressed to find a clone of ourselves even if the world had 7 trillion people. The exception is if you were born with an identical sibling. But then again, you would know if you had a twin. Wouldn’t you?

The documentary Three Identical Strangers tells the unbelievable story of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman – three identical triplets who were separated at birth and serendipitously reunited at the age of 19. The film takes us through the circumstances of their reunion, highlighting the brothers’ instant rapport over their similarities and the ensuing fame resulting from the public fascination with their extraordinary story. It began as a euphoria-filled saga complete with talk show interviews, movie cameos, and even a successful restaurant which they called “Triplets”.

The honeymoon phase ended in horrific fashion once the parents of the respective siblings began asking questions as to why the brothers were separated in the first place. A journalist who had been investigating the triplets’ adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, helped to uncover the details of an elaborate study performed by a child psychiatrist named Dr. Peter Neubauer. In this study, each brother was placed into a home which had another adoptive sister, and specifically assigned to a family of lower, middle, and upper-class backgrounds. While the exact details of the study objective remain unknown, it appears that the study was trying to determine whether psychiatric illness was correlated more strongly with genetics or with developmental environment; this is referred to colloquially as a “nature vs. nurture” experiment.

The implications were earth-shattering. The brothers struggled to cope with the realization that they had been marionettes in some sort of sick experiment, with Dr. Neubauer pulling the strings the whole time. Even worse was the fact that there were possibly several more identical siblings with the same story who were deprived of their biological soul mate, all at the behest of Neubauer and his associates. In fact, other sets of identical siblings were eventually made aware of the experiment, and did have the chance to meet, albeit many years after their birth.

The triplets also learned that their biological mother had serious psychiatric problems – hence their inclusion in the study. All three brothers had behavioral difficulties as adolescents, and it was distressing to consider whether their issues may have been exacerbated by the separation anxiety they experienced upon being separated at birth. In particular, Eddy suffered from worsening episodes of bipolar disorder throughout his life. In 1995, at the age of 33, he committed suicide. He is notably absent for the duration of the documentary, with Bobby and David narrating much of the film. Today, they are still trying to uncover the particulars of Dr. Neubauer’s study, but the research records remain under seal at Yale University until 2066. They may never know the full extent of what was done to them and why.

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In 1632, at the age of only 26, Rembrandt finished a large (85.2 in × 66.7 in) oil painting that was destined to become one of his best known works and certainly one of the linchpins in the nexus between the graphic arts and the medical humanities. "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" depicts the dissection of the flexor tendons of the left arm of a cadaver by the eponymous doctor while an attentive audience of his peers, identifiable members of the medical and anatomical community of early 17th century Amsterdam, looks on. Nina Siegal's novel tells her imagined back story of this richly illustrated anatomy lesson which, once you read her captivating novel, will make you ask yourself, as I did, why no one has thought fit to do so heretofore.

Using multiple first person narrators, Siegal examines the characters (some historical, others wholly fictional) and events leading up to the anatomy lesson and Rembrandt's artistic rendering of it. Inventing a life for Aris Kindt (born Adriaen  Adriaenszoon), the historically real career criminal whose recently judicial hanging provides the body we see in the painting, Siegal provides him with Flora, a lover who is carrying his illegitimate child at the time of his public - and quite raucous - hanging. Growing up in Leiden, in the same neighborhood as Flora and Rembrandt himself, Kindt was the physically and emotionally abused son of a leather worker and, in Siegal's imagination, a petty but persistent thief hanged for his inveterate and irremediable life of crime. As was the custom of the day, his body was legally assigned to an anatomist for public dissection. With a non-linear narrative, organized into brief chapters entitled for body parts, Siegal traces the beginnings of three of the protagonists - Kindt, Flora, and Rembrandt. She constructs  how their lives intersect not only before, during and after the hanging, but also in more philosophical strokes, namely the medical, theological and artistic tapestry on which this image rests. There are several minor characters, like Tulp and his family; Jan Fetchet, the "famulus" responsible for securing and preparing Kindt's body immediately following the hanging; and even René Descartes, who seems to have been in town during this momentous occasion pursuing his own polymathic research, which included anatomy at the time.  Siegal adds a few reports dictated by a fictional modern- day conservator offering her interpretation of many of the details of Rembrandt's masterpiece, details that serve to highlight aspects of Siegal's narrative, such as the possible artistic re-implantation of Kindt's amputated right hand.

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Citing numerous studies that might be surprising to both lay and professional readers, Dr. Rakel makes a compelling case for the efficacy of empathic, compassionate, connective behavior in medical care.  Words, touch, body language, and open-ended questions are some of the ways caregivers communicate compassion, and they have been shown repeatedly to make significant differences in the rate of healing. The first half of the book develops the implications of these claims; the second half offers instruction and insight about how physicians and other caregivers can cultivate practices of compassion that make them better at what they do.  

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