Summary:

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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In this collection, twenty-two medical students and young physicians across the United States eloquently recount the process of medical education for those who do not believe they fit standard measures of student demographics. The editors, Takakuwa, an emergency medicine resident physician; Rubashkin, a medical student; and Herzig, who holds a doctorate in health psychology, group the essays into three sections: Life and Family Histories, Shifting Identities, and Confronted.

Each section is prefaced by an essay explicating the essay selection process, the history of medical school admissions policies and requirements, the basic progression of medical education and the reasons for this collection, such as "putting a human face" (p. xx) on the changing characteristics of admitted medical students: "With their diversity and through their self-reflections, we hope that these students will bring new gifts and insights to the practice of medicine and that they might one day play an important role in transforming American medical education into a fairer and more responsive system." (p. 141)

Additionally, a foreword by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders outlines her experience as a black woman entering medical school in 1956, including eating in the segregated cafeteria. The book concludes with recommendations for further reading and improvements to the medical education process as well as with brief biographies of the contributors and editors.

The range of essays is impressive: diversity itself is given a new meaning by the variety of narrative voices in this volume. Contributors include people from impoverished backgrounds, both immigrant (Vietnamese, Mexican) and not. One student, marginalized by his academic difficulties, began a homeless existence during his first clinical year. Others were made to feel different because of being African or Native American.

In two essays, mothers defy labels placed on them (pregnant black teen; lesbian) and describe the trials and triumphs of their situations. Students write of being subjected to ridicule, ignorance and prejudice due to their gender, interest in complementary medicine, political and advocacy views, or religious beliefs. Due to pressures to conform, even students from what might be considered more mainstream in American culture (e.g., growing up in a small town, or being Christian) can experience the effects of being "different" when in medical school.

A number of essays communicate the difficulties of illness, disability and bodily differences. Issues include recovered alcoholism (rather tellingly, this is the only essay that is anonymous), obsessive compulsive disorder, sickle cell anemia, Tourette Disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, chronic pain, and obesity. The authors balance their narratives of hardship with insights into how their struggles improve their opportunities for empathy, perspective and fulfillment as physicians.

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West coast dancer John Henry made his life the subject of his final performance. Choreographer Bromberg and film maker Rosenberg collaborate with Henry in the creation of a work for the theatre based on his desire to leave an autobiographic legacy. Filmed during the last few years of Henry's life with HIV/AIDS, the documentary examines the image of self as one individual prepares to separate from body and personhood, and continues after his death.

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This book, designed to accompany an exhibition "on the frequently Excessive & flamboyant Seller of Nostrums as shown in prints, posters, caricatures, books, pamphlets, advertisements & other Graphic arts over the last five centuries," displays and comments on 183 illustrations associated with the art of quackery. As the title suggests, Helfand surveys the graphic material of quackery of England, France, and America during the modern period, although most of the material dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his introduction, Helfand discusses the uncertain boundaries between "regular" (now termed allopathic) physicians and their "irregular" or "empiric" counterparts--quacks.

Through the mid-nineteenth century, many practitioners of both sorts relied on pharmaceutical agents like mercury, antimony, and opium; developed trade symbols and packaging; and flaunted the honorific "Dr." and their affiliation with science. Many patients visited both regulars and irregulars, who might consult with each other. Some physicians even prescribed quacks' proprietary preparations. Helfand also notes differences, such as irregulars' lack of medical training, exaggerated advertising, refusal to disclose the contents of their products, and use of entertainment and sometimes even religion in their "medicine shows."

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Gilbert and George's work over the past three decades has largely consisted of grid-like photomontages - note, they consider their work to be "sculpture". These often massive works are at once easily identifiable as part of Gilbert and George's oeuvre (in part because they often have Gilbert and George in them) and unflinchingly referential: to the manufactured sheen and unnaturally bright neons of Warhol, to the confrontational exposure of Mapplethorpe's photography, and, of course, to cathedral stained glass. They draw upon these same influences in their creative self-creation, their transgressive aesthetics, and their repetition and reworking of religious and secular motifs intertwined with abstractions. Gilbert and George are insistently doubles: original and derivative, repetitive and evolving, reactionary and visionary.

The Fundamental Pictures consists of a series of some 39 scultptures, most involving juxtapositions of bodily execretia - sputum, tears, urine, semen, feces - in monumental close-up; the tears, urine and semen are captured through a microscope, dessicated and crystalized. The sensational titles of the individual works, such as 'Piss Faith' and 'Spit on Shit', are fairly accurate in describing the central themes of each work. In some of the montages, Gilbert and George appear, pink and naked, against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of bright, magnified bodily fluids; in others, they are dressed in their familiar suits. They were exhibited at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, in 1997.

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Chicago architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) and his much younger, beautiful wife, Louisa (Chloe Webb), arrive in Italy to work for a year preparing an exhibition on his hero, the post-revolutionary French architect, Etienne-Louis Boullée (d. 1799). They make love as the train enters Italy; however, he scarcely looks at his wife again. On the evening of his welcoming dinner--set in the piazza in front of the Pantheon--Kracklite is wracked by the first of the endless, excruciating pains in his belly.

Louisa is pregnant, but in boredom and frustration, she takes an Italian lover, Caspasian (Lambert Wilson). The dashing, young architect has designs on the American's exhibition as well as on his wife; his photographer sister, Flavia, shares the intrigue. Kracklite entertains the hypothesis that his unfaithful wife is trying to poison him. A doctor tells him that the sinister pains are due to his lifestyle, but he does not believe this diagnosis and drifts into a subdued paranoia with delusions of persecution and of grandeur.

Obsessed with the shapes and contents--the architecture and the anatomy--of bellies in sculpture, painting, and photography, Kracklite photocopies ever larger and larger images which he "maps" on to his own prodigious abdomen. He writes postcards to Boulleé pouring out his fears. He identifies with Roman emperors, Christ, and Isaac Newton, to whom Boullée designed a never-constructed, hemispheric cenotaph, the belly-like model of which appears often, recapitulating Kracklite's obsession and Louisa's pregnancy.

After he learns he has cancer, he ends his life by falling backward in a Christ-like posture through a window during the opening ceremony of his Boullée project. At that same moment, his wife gives birth to their child, having cut the ribbon/cord to open the hemispherical exhibition.

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The foreground of Painting features a man dressed in a black suit and holding an umbrella. His face, hoary and grotesque, is obscured above his moustache by the shadow of an umbrella. A yellow flower attached to the lapel of the man's jacket stands out clearly against the black of his clothing, and is the only yellow used in the painting.

The man sits or stands inside a round enclosure made either of white metal or wood. Around the perimeter of these circular bars, two pieces of meat--what appear to be shanks of beef--are penetrated and supported by the enclosure. In front of the man, a platform of some sort extends toward the viewer. Behind him hangs a massive carcass, its limbs suspended outwards to expose the ribcage.

Three rectangular shapes that seem to be window blinds hang with cords behind the suspended meat. In the middle of the painting, in the deep background, abstract shapes that may or may not be human forms stand around on a catwalk.

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The Agnew Clinic by Eakins was commissioned by Dr. D. Hayes Agnew's students at the University of Pennsylvania to celebrate the seventy-year-old physician's retirement as Professor of Surgery in 1889. It was unveiled at commencement 1 May 1889. The size of the painting, the largest Eakins ever created, is 84 3/8 x 118 1/8 inches. The artist painted the work in ninety days and received a fee of $750. Its frame carries this inscription in Latin: The most experienced surgeon, the clearest writer and teacher, the most venerated and beloved man.

Dr. Agnew (1818-1892), a Pennsylvania native, was a well-respected surgeon and educator who had served in two army hospitals during the Civil War. He was best known for his competence in removing bullets, but Eakins has chosen to show him performing a lumpectomy or partial mastectomy.

The surgeon is shown standing in an enclosure, having stepped back from the operation. He is lecturing to students, faculty, and spectators seated in the operating theatre. Dr. Agnew holds a scalpel in his left hand. He is wearing a white surgical gown.

Eakins has placed the operating table with the female patient in front of Dr. Agnew. Her hair and face are visible, the ether cone just above her chin. Her right breast and arm are shown; the left breast is being operated on. A sheet covers her lower body. The sheet beneath the patient carries the inscription: University of Pennsylvania. Between Dr. Agnew and the bed we see a closed case holding the sterilized instruments. The anesthesiologist and the surgeons all wear white. Dr. Agnew's nurse, Mary Clymer, stands by the patient's waist. She is dressed in a high white cap, white apron and black dress.

Eakins illuminates Dr. Agnew, the patient and her doctors, and the nurse. The spectators sit in semi-darkness, but they are individualized by face and posture. The painting contains about thirty small portraits of doctors. Most of the doctors and spectators have been identified by name (see site at University of Pennsylvania: http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/1800s/1889med/agnewclinic.html). Eakins is standing to the extreme right, listening to a doctor who whispers to him. Because of time constraints, Eakins's mini portrait was painted by his wife, the artist Susan Macdowell Eakins.

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21 butter-hued felt canvases, each with a lithograph of a wig; accompanied by a number of much smaller felt canvases with slogans imprinted on them.

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Aaron Raz Link was born a girl, named Sarah, and loved as a daughter. Twenty-nine years later, after inner turmoil, deep thought and relentless examination of how society views gender, Sarah became Aaron, a gay man. This starkly open and moving book describes, in Aaron's words and then in his mother's words, both the costs and the rewards of this journey.

The book is divided into two sections: the longer, beginning section is Aaron's, an intense rendering of what might be called an inner dialogue: Aaron talking to himself about his place in a gendered world; Aaron talking to society about the role of men and women; and Aaron talking to us, the readers, as if we were his close friends, gathered around him as he revealed his life.

The second section belongs to his mother, Hilda Raz. In musing, episodic scenes, she writes about herself as Sarah and then Aaron's mother, about her own work as a poet and editor, and most poignantly about losing her breast to cancer.

On page 86 Aaron says, "A stereotype is a kind of camouflage; the eye finds what it expects to find, and passes over details." Throughout this book we are asked to look at, directly but never sensationally, our bodies' organs, our gender "details," not only as functional anatomy but as symbols of identification.

In both sections, I felt pulled along on this journey, both as someone invited and as someone looking on, an emotional voyeur, and in both sections I observed the unflinching honesty of the authors' revelations. But it in was this final section, the mother's story, that I felt most keenly the love between the two authors. It is this love that becomes the strength of the narrative, the ground on which this incredible story unfolds.

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