Showing 11 - 20 of 211 annotations tagged with the keyword "Childbirth"
Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Essay
Summary:
Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Memoir
Summary:
The Scar is a powerful, thoughtful, and moving book, part memoir about the author’s illness across some 30 years, part history of depression and its treatment and part essay to evoke cultural and personal values about sickness, suffering, health, and death. Cregan, a gifted stylist herself, draws on literature that deals with human suffering, mortality, and wisdom. She frankly describes her sorrows and hopes, the death of her baby, her attempts to kill herself, and her survival today with many blessings.Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Memoir
Summary:
Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Memoir
Summary:
Weeks after the birth of her child, the writer receives a phone call informing her that her mother, who has gone missing, has hanged herself. This memoir, like others written in the aftermath of similar trauma, is an effort to make some sense of the mother’s mental illness and horrifying death. Unlike many others, though, it is the story of a family system—and to some extent a medical system—bewildered by an illness that, even if it carried known diagnostic labels, was hard to treat effectively and meaningfully. The short chapters alternate three kinds of narrative: in some the writer addresses her mother; in some she recalls scenes from her own childhood, plagued by a range of symptoms and illness, and her gradual awareness of her gifted mother’s pathological imagination; in some she reproduces the transcript of a video production her mother narrated entitled “The Art of Misdiagnosis” about her own and her daughters’ medical histories. Threaded among memories of her early life are those of her very present life with a husband, older children, a new baby, a beloved sister and a father who has also suffered the effects of the mother’s psychosis at close range.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.Primary Category: Literature / Fiction
Genre: Novel
Summary:
Set in the loosely fictionalized Jamaican town of Augustown (“loosely,” as it bears a strong resemblance to August Town, which was absorbed over time into the expansion of Kingston), the novel spans three generations of a single family. The novel moves back and forth easily through different moments in time, from the birth of Rastafariansim in 1920 under British colonional rule, through the post-colonial division of the island and its citizens into turbulent threads, to the present day of 1982, where the same tensions run strong as ever.Primary Category: Literature / Fiction
Genre: Novel
Summary:
On a stormy night in 1968 a retired, widowed schoolteacher in rural Pennsylvania opens her door to find a young couple, she white, he African American, wrapped in blankets, drenched, and silent. Letting them in changes her life. They have escaped together from a nearby mental institution most locals simply call "The School." The young woman has recently given birth. When Martha lets them in, her life changes forever. Supervisors from "the School" show up at the door, the young man escapes, and the young woman, memorably beautiful, is taken back into custody. The only words she is able to speak out of what we learn has been a years-long silence are "Hide her." Thus she leaves her newborn baby to be raised by a stranger. The remaining chapters span more than forty years in the stories of these people, linked by fate and love and the brutalities of an unreformed system that incarcerated, neglected, and not infrequently abused people who were often misdiagnosed. Homan, the young man who loved Lynnie, the beautiful girl from the institution, was deaf, not retarded. Lynnie was simply "slow," but a gifted artist who recorded many of the events of her life in drawings she shared only with the one attendant who valued and loved her. Though her pregnancy resulted from being raped by a staff member, the deaf man longs to protect her and care for the baby. Years separate them; Homan eventually learns signing; Lynnie's sister befriends her and an exposé results in the closure of the institution. Over those years Lynnie and Homan witness much cultural change in treatment of people like them who were once systematically excluded. They find social identities that once would have been entirely unavailable to them. And eventually, after literal and figurative journeys of discovery, they rediscover each other.Primary Category: Literature / Fiction
Genre: Novel
Summary:
Kenan Oak returns from World War I to a small Ontario town. He is virtually unable to speak and dares not venture from his home. Adopted by a reclusive uncle at an early age, he has no immediate family but his wife, Tressa, who loves him and accepts his disability with good grace. They have been trying to have a child without success, and the glimmers of Kenan’s recovery are dauntingly few and faint. Slowly with the help of his uncle Am, he begins to go out at night for walks in the woods and skating on the ice of the lake.Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Memoir
Summary:
This memoir of a life in medicine takes the writer from St. Louis to a Navajo reservation to Central America to the east coast and from urban hospitals to ill-equipped rural clinics. It offers a wide range of reflections on encounters with patients that widen and deepen his sense of calling and understanding of what it means to do healing work. He learns to listen to tribal elders, to what children communicate without words, to worried parents, and to his own intuition while calling on all the skills he acquired in a rigorous medical education. Always drawn to writing, Volck takes his writing work (and play) as seriously as his medical practice, and muses on the role of writing in the medical life as he goes along.Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction
Genre: Memoir
Summary:
Many are familiar with these stories from the author's practice as a midwife among the urban poor in London's East End in the 1950s. Each piece stands alone as a story about a particular case. Many of them are rich with the drama of emergency interventions, birth in complicated families (most of them poor), home births in squalid conditions, and the efforts of midwives to improve public health services, sanitation, and pre- and post-natal care with limited resources in a city decimated by wartime bombings. As a gallery of the different types of women in the Anglican religious order that housed the midwives and administered their services, and the different types of women who lived, survived, and even thrived in the most depressing part of London, the book provides a fascinating angle on social and medical history and women's studies.