Showing 3241 - 3250 of 3444 annotations

Healers

Massad, Stewart

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Moore, Pamela

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The male narrator works in an abortion clinic. On a daily basis he faces taunts from protesters and the bloody fragments of fetuses. His only consolations are his loving dog and a female lover. He says that he sticks with the job because he loves women and can't turn them down when they ask for his help. One day, he comes home from work to find that a protester has killed his dog. His lover comes and comforts him.

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Casualties

Massad, Stewart

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Moore, Pamela
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

An intern is on duty in a cancer ward. He especially deals with leukemia. He tells one of his patients that he understands how she feels as she cries, facing death. She turns on him, telling him that he can't possibly understand. A short time later, the intern grows weak and ill. He is diagnosed as having leukemia. He spends months in the hospital, feeling helpless as his old classmates treat him. He makes them promise to let him die peacefully when his time comes. He dies when an intern accidentally pierces his spleen while trying to tap his lung.

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Old Doc Rivers

Williams, William Carlos

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Moore, Pamela
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

Old Doc Rivers is an old-time doctor who believes in prompt decisions and quick action. Although he is recognized as an alcoholic and drug abuser, the people in the community still hold him in high esteem and often turn to him for help when all else has failed. His story is told from the perspective of several people in his home town after his death.

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A Night in June

Williams, William Carlos

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Moore, Pamela
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The doctor-narrator has been present at the birth of seven of Angelina's eight children. She is now in labor with the ninth. The mother is an Italian immigrant. The labor is prolonged, but without complications. The doctor spends much of the evening peacefully asleep in the kitchen.

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Jean Beicke

Williams, William Carlos

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Moore, Pamela
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The doctor-narrator is working in a hospital during the Great Depression. The pediatric ward cares for many children left there by families unable to feed or care for them. The doctor sometimes thinks the children should just be allowed to die. One particular child captures his interest. She has a high fever and he cannot figure out why. Her condition becomes progressively worse and she dies. It turns out that she had meningitis. Perhaps he could have saved her if he had made the correct diagnosis. Yet, he doesn't feel guilty.

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Outpatient

Warren, Rosalind

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Squier, Harriet

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

This is a light-hearted short story about an attractive, middle-aged female hypnotist who has a minor respiratory infection and visits the doctor. At first she hypnotizes the nurses so that they will put her in the examining room without a wait, and convinces them that her vital signs are different from what they had originally measured.

After this initial, good-natured experiment, the narrator waits a full 45 minutes for the doctor. He is abrupt and impersonal. Out of frustration, she hypnotizes him, and learns that he is afraid to be warm with patients, and is afraid to take time with them, because he needs to maintain control. She has him undress, put on a gown, and then leaves him to shiver in the exam room. She tells him that he will never forget what this humiliating experience feels like.

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Disappearing

Wood, Monica

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The narrator starts out at 300 plus pounds (disgusted with herself and remote from her husband). She takes swimming lessons and gradually acquires confidence in herself as she loses weight and inches. She sometimes refuses sex with her husband, starts to stand up for herself. But her swimming and diet become obsessive; she continues to lose weight and wants to disappear.

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Doctors and Other Casualties

Massad, Stewart

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

This is a collection of short stories by a young physician, Stewart Massad, who completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and a fellowship in gynecologic cancer. The stories are all written in the first person, all physicians. The subjects include the physical/emotional demands of residency ("Fatigue"), especially as they strain a marriage; the motivations of a doctor who runs an abortion clinic ("Healers"); and a young doctor facing his own fatal illness and his experience as a patient ("Casualties"). While the stories do portray the difficulties (and often angst) of training, they do so without the despair/cynicism often found in other accounts of the same experience.

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A Poster of the Cosmos

Wilson, Lanford

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

A powerful one person/one act play set in a police station in Manhattan. Addressing a cop "who would be at the other end of the table," Tom, a 36-year-old baker suffering from "survivor guilt," has been accused of killing his lover Johnny who had been dying from AIDS. Throughout the interrogation Tom offers insight into his and Johnny's lives prior to and during their relationship. His story also is permeated with attacks on an uncaring and ignorant society, especially when he mocks the interrogator's derogatory refrain, "You don't look like the kinna guy'd do somethin' like dat."

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When

Williams, C. K. (Charles Kenneth)

Last Updated: Jan-28-1997
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

A wonderful poem about an old, dying man recognizing he is dying before any one else in the family will admit it. He wants them to help him die--a kind of family consensus on euthanasia, which he seems to control. After much family discussion, they agree to help him by giving him enough pills to "put him to sleep." He jokes with his family as they assist his dying: "On the day it would happen, the old man would be funny again: wolfing down handfuls of pills, 'I know this'll upset my stomach,' he'd say."

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