Summary:

This story of one exceptionally accomplished family's discovery of their past and future relationships with Huntington's Disease (HD) is also the story of how the Wexler family changed the cultural narrative of HD for other families at risk for this genetically-transmitted and currently incurable disease. The HD diagnosis of Leonore Wexler (the author's mother) inspires Milton Wexler, a psychologist, to create a major foundation for HD research, which develops critical mass and influence as Leonore Wexler's condition deteriorates, and after her death. The book interweaves the story of the Wexlers' emotional and other negotiations with HD and the story of their efforts to create an HD community comprised of those with active symptoms of HD, family members, advocates, and researchers.

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Dr. Dymov is an earnest and rather boring young physician, who is preoccupied with his patients and his research. Olga, his wife, craves the excitement and gaiety of the artistic life. She discovers a new lease on romance with Ryabovsky, a colorful landscape artist, who takes her on a cruise on the Volga River. As they spoon under the stars, Olga and her lover make light of her bumptious stay-at-home husband.

After she returns from the cruise, Dymov forgives her infidelity, but in Olga's mind, his forgiveness proves to be another strike against the poor slob, since she just can't stand his complaisant devotion. She runs back to Ryabovsky for a while, until he makes it clear that he is bored with her.

Then one day Dymov develops diphtheria, evidently contracted by "sucking up the mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid . . . just from folly." Dymov soon becomes delirious, and then dies. Suddenly, Olga is overcome with guilt and grief. Too late, Olga realizes that her husband was a hero.

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The new interns, Roy Basch (Tim Matheson), Chuck (Howard Rollins, Jr.) and Wayne Potts (Michael Sacks), begin their year of internal medicine training in a busy city hospital under construction. After initial introductions led by the vague staff man and vapid chief resident, they become the specific charges of the cynical resident doctor "Fats" (Charles Haid). Fats teaches them attitude and language: how to "buff" (improve) and "turf" (transfer) "gomers" (Get Out of My Emergency Room)--the words used to describe management of incurable, hateful patients who "never die," regardless of the abuse the clumsy housestaff might inflict. But Fats has heart.

Soon, they fall under the command of the militaristic and lonely woman resident, Jo Miller (Lisa Pelikan), who cannot bring herself to withhold treatment, even at a patient's request. She blames underlings for the failings of medicine and nature, as well as herself.

Wayne throws himself from the hospital roof because of a misplaced sense of guilt over a patient's demise. Roy falls in love with the nurse, Molly (Kathryn Dowling), but nearly loses her as he begins to emulate Jo's cold, calculating style. He is "rescued" in the nick of time by his friends, Fats, and the death of a physician patient (Ossie Davis) whom he admires. With recovered equanimity and renewed anger over the suicide of his fellow intern, Roy refuses to go on with his residency.

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Winter investigates the process by which Freudian psychoanalysis became legitimized within modern Western culture and internalized as a kind of "psychological common sense" (4). She argues that Freud's adoption of the Oedipus myth allowed him to draw on the cultural status of classical scholarship and claim the universality of the tragic theme for his own project. She traces how Freud worked to establish an institutional infrastructure for psychoanalysis, to establish it as a profession. His analysis of culture and society represents another strategy in establishing and extending the importance of psychoanalysis: the claim that psychoanalysis powerfully illuminates not only the workings of the human brain (the domain of psychiatry, psychology, and neurology) but also the functions of society (the analytic domain of anthropology and sociology).

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In 1768 the young, feeble-minded King Christian VII of Denmark sets off on a prolonged tour of European capitals. His "handlers" determine that he needs to have a doctor along to help fend off, and to treat, the King’s frequent bouts of "agitation." Therefore, they appoint Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German physician from Altona, as the Royal Physician. Christian and Struensee develop a close bond; when the trip is over, the Royal Physician stays with the King and becomes a permanent fixture at the Danish court.

Christian is unstable and childlike. He enjoys playing games, but is totally uninterested in his beautiful young English wife, Caroline Mathilde. She becomes pregnant the first time he visits her, but he never sleeps with her again. Meanwhile, the King’s ministers actually run the government, even though he is theoretically an absolute monarch.

When Struensee, who is an Enlightenment intellectual, enters this ménage, he decides to reform the State by getting King Christian to agree to a series of enlightened new laws. Having won the King’s ear, the Royal Physician proceeds to rule Denmark for several years and to institute many of the reforms proposed by Voltaire and the other Enlightenment philosophers. Struensee also begins a tender, prolonged, and obvious love affair with the queen, who subsequently bears him a daughter.

The end of this story is not difficult to predict. Aggrieved members of the aristocracy manipulate the king to strip Dr. Struensee of his power and have him executed for adultery with Queen Caroline. She and the baby girl are shipped back to her home in England. The new Prime Minister retracts all of the reforms enacted by Struensee. And the demented king lives on in the fiction of his absolute power.

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In Edinburgh 1879, the famous actress Hermione Clery and her young lover are brutally murdered. A young man, Alan Lambert, stands accused of the crime, arrested after an expensive chase across the Atlantic. His brother, Graeme, appeals to Dr. Joseph Bell, professor of surgery and one of a dynasty in Scottish academic medicine. At first reluctant, Bell agrees to investigate the case and engages his medical student Arthur Conan Doyle in the task.

The story is told from Doyle's imperfect perspective. Beset by many obstacles from the police, the courts, and the Lambert family, Bell's investigation reveals a string of errors, including police sloppiness, suspicious evidence, and corruption in both government and law enforcement. On the day of the planned execution, Bell identifies the true killer and his motive, saving Lambert from wrongful death.

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Lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) comes to town preying on the grief of the citizens who have lost their children or seen them harmed when a school bus slid off the road and sank through a frozen lake. He encounters a network of secrets and distorted perceptions of blame, guilt, lies, and victimhood revealed by flashbacks. Grieving the loss of his challenged son, the sinister but simple motel keeper, Wendell (Maury Chaykin), warns Stephens off the case, blaming parents, children, drivers, and the road. He does not know that his wife has been sleeping in one of the vacant rooms with a good-looking widower whose son and daughter both drowned.

The Otto family, especially the mother (Arsinée Khanjian) are destroyed by the loss of their beloved adopted son, a smiling native child, called Bear. They are confused. On the one hand, they want nothing because their loss was accidental; on the other, they want vengeance because someone must be blamed for their overwhelming pain. The bus driver, Dolores, who has lost so many of "her kids" seems not to have grasped the full extent of the tragedy or the possibility that all could be blamed on her.

And yet it could. The crucial evidence is the speed at which she took the last downhill curve. The key witness is a teenager, Nicole (Sarah Polley), who sat just behind the driver and survived the accident as a paraplegic. Her father is eager for her to testify, hoping for a large settlement. It slowly emerges that his seemingly close relationship with Nicole before the accident was incestuous. Now she is seething with anger toward him--because of his past abuse? or because of his present abandonment? or both? She claims that Dolores was driving too fast. The case collapses. Stephens later sees Dolores driving a group of seniors.

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Thirteen years into the epidemic, Hollywood's first mainstream response to AIDS premiered: Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. In an attempt to neutralize the inherent difficulties posed by the subject matter (a sexually transmitted and deadly disease) and the characters (male homosexuals), the director consistently described the film as an analysis of prejudice, while Tristar Pictures, which released it, confusedly promoted it as a film that was not really about AIDS or about somebody who had AIDS.

What the film appears to be about is Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), the rising star of Philadelphia's most prestigious law firm. Unbeknownst to his co-workers, Andrew is gay and has AIDS. When the truth is suspected, he is fired on trumped up charges of incompetence and decides to sue his former bosses for AIDS-based discrimination.

Nine lawyers refuse the case as does Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), an avowed homophobic and AIDS-phobic ambulance chaser. He later changes his stance and takes the case as a matter of simple justice although he remains steadfast in his prejudice against gays. With the support of his partner, Miguel (Antonio Banderas), Andrew takes on the system. He wins the case and dies the following day.

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Kutcherov is the engineer in charge of building a bridge across the river two miles from the village of Obrutchanovo. He decides he likes the countryside so much that he buys some land and builds a house (the new villa) for his family near the village. The engineer and his wife attempt to befriend the local people, but the villagers continually complain about their own poverty and misuse the newcomers' good will.

Some villagers, led by Volodka, the blacksmith's son, act out their anger and desperation by insulting the engineer's wife and allowing their animals to graze around the new villa. These peasants complain that they never wanted the bridge in the first place; it only represents governmental interference.

Other villagers, represented by Rodion, the blacksmith, advise the Kutcherovs to be patient--in the long run, the peasants will learn to accept them. Eventually, after several incidents of vandalism, Kutcherov gets fed up and moves his family back to Moscow. The new villa lies empty.

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The police receive a report that Mark Ivanovitch Klyauzov has been murdered. Indeed. he has not left his bedroom in a week. When the inspector and his assistant arrive, they soon find "evidence" that Klyauzov. a man who led a life of drunken debauchery, was strangled in his room, carried out the window, and later stabbed in the garden to finish him off.

Dyukovsky, the brash young assistant inspector. eagerly interprets every clue. He concludes that three perpetrators were involved in the murder. Two held down the drunken Klauzov, while the third person strangled him. They quickly arrest the valet and the gardener. But who is the third culprit? Could it be Klyauzov's sister, who disagreed with him over religion?

Dyukovsky identifies the central clue, an unusual Swedish match dropped at the scene of the crime. By brilliant detective work, he discovers that a pack of Swedish matches was purchased by the police superintendent's young wife. The inspectors confront he--she quickly caves in. However, all is not as it seems, as the story rushes (or perhaps. lurches) to its surprise ending.

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