Summary:

The poet stands before an ancient Lycian tomb, upon which is carved the sorrowful face of a woman: "One woman garbed in sorrow’s every mood." He reflects on the constancy of loss in human life. He asks the woman to weep for him, also, because [I] "Share thy stilled sadness, which must ever be / Too changeless, and unending like my own . . . . "

Though the Lycian woman’s grief is old, the poet’s is young. He has lost a child: "With that too human wail in pain expressed, / The parent cry above the empty nest." He is skeptical about dreams of a better life. He rejects "The first confusing, mad bewilderment, / Life’s unbelief in death . . . . " Death is real and final. He concludes with full understanding that "life is but a tender instrument / Whereon the master hand of grief doth fall."

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This lively volume of medical history chronicles the forms of suffering, illness, injury, and treatment endured by the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1805. Beginning with three chapters of political and medical history to set the context, the story follows the adventures of the extraordinarily fortunate "Corps of Discovery" among whom Lewis was the most trained in the medicine of the time (having studied in preparation for the trip under Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia), and he only an amateur. Even professional medicine of the time was approximate and largely ineffectual, limited mostly to purgatives, opiates and laudanum for pain relief, bleeding, and topical applications of various compounds or herbal substances.

The story chronicles the main events of the trip based on the extensive journals of Lewis and Clark as well as other historical account, maintaining focus in each chapter on the medical incidents including gastrointestinal distress from parasites and contaminated water; effects of overexposure like hypothermia and exhaustion; infections from wounds and scratches; syphilis; dislocations; muscular spasms; mosquitoes and other insect bites; snakebites and other animal attacks.

Along the way Peck pauses to explain the rather rudimentary medical theories upon which treatments were based, the effects of particular known treatments, and what Lewis and others likely knew, guessed at, or didn’t understand about lead, mercury, opium, and certain herbal substances they used. He speculates about the contexts of their medical decisions and offers occasional contemporary analogies to help readers imagine the circumstances and tradeoffs the explorers faced.

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In 1996, at the age of 31, David Biro is preparing for his specialty examinations in dermatology and is set to share a practice with his father. But he develops a visual disturbance. After repeated testing, he is found to have the rare blood disorder of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. The diagnosis was problematic, but the treatment choices are overwhelming. His youngest sister is a suitable donor, and he opts for a bone marrow transplant. He realizes that his decision was influenced not only by the diagnosis, but also by his personality and his reaction to the physicians.

Advance preparations are hectic and sometimes comic, especially his deposits at a local sperm bank. The pain of the transplant and the six weeks imprisonment in a small hospital room are told in graphic detail. The athletically inclined doctor suffers many complications: exquisitely painful ulcers of the scrotum, mouth, and esophagus; inflammation of the liver; unexplained fever; drug-induced delirium; weakness and weight loss.

His parents, sisters and friends leap into action to provide round-the-clock presence, but his independent wife, Daniella, resents the invasion. While David’s body is wracked with drugs and radiation, his family and his marriage are subjected to destructive forces too. Yet all--body, family, and marriage--emerge intact, though changed, by their experience.

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Although the setting is startlingly different, and the care provided is through highly unorthodox means, the healer in this science fiction story experiences in remarkably similar ways the everyday wear and tear of modern medical practice. Snake, a young female itinerant healer, has been asked to save the life of a young boy. Her attempts to do so, and her interactions with the boy, his family and community, and the tools of her trade (the snakes-mist, sand and grass) are detailed in the story. "Professional development" issues that this strong and complex character has to deal with include truth-telling, interfering and ignorant family members, self-sacrifice, and possible reprobation by her peers and teachers.

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Most of the film takes place inside the body of a slob, a widower named Frank (Bill Murray). The live-action sequences trace Frank’s illness: because of his unhealthy habits, he contracts a virus, develops an extremely high fever, and almost dies. After a miraculous recovery, he decides to follow the advice of his sensible daughter, Shane, and get more exercise, eat healthy food, and so on.

The rest of the film is animated, and tells the story of the illness from inside Frank’s body, a city with its own police force (the immune system, its precincts in the lymph nodes), organized crime (microbes who have a steambath in Frank’s armpit), the media (NNN, the Nerve Network News). The town is run from Cerebellum Hall by the corrupt Mayor Phlegmming, who discourages healthy eating habits because the huge number of fat cells vote for him. Chaos threatens with the arrival of Thrax (the voice of Laurence Fishburne), a virus who, as he puts it himself, "makes ebola look like dandruff."

The heroes are Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell (who is literally blue, and voiced by the black comedian Chris Rock), and Drix, a cold capsule (voice of David Hyde Pierce). Jones has been suspended for using "unnecessary force," by making Frank throw up in public (and in fact saving his life by expelling a toxic oyster), and Drix develops an inferiority complex when he realizes that he does not cure disease, but is only "for the temporary relief of symptoms." The two team up as vigilantes and, along with the attractive Leah, another immune cell who works as the Mayor’s Aid, they defeat Thrax and save the city.

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Summary:

Starchenko, a country doctor, and Lyzhin, an acting coroner, travel through a snowstorm to reach the village of Syrna, where they are to hold an inquest regarding the death of Lesnitsky. Three days earlier, Lesnitsky had shot himself in the office of the village council.

When the two officials finally arrive after sundown, the witnesses have gone home for tea; only the talkative old constable remains. Starchenko and Lyzhin eventually proceed to the von Taunitz mansion for comfortable quarters and an evening of entertainment. The storm is so severe that the next day they remain at the mansion, rather than conducting the inquest.

On the third day, as they prepare to return to the village, where the witnesses have been waiting for them, they see the old constable standing in the snow. "Very restive them peasants are," he says. "Have pity on them, kind sirs."

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This work, originally entitled "Three Women," is a semi-autobiographical story of Willa Cather, her mother and grandmother, four younger children--all boys--the father, and a servant girl, who all lived together in a small midwestern town. The roles of the three women are beautifully described: the gentle grandmother who cared for and taught the children, her daughter, a displaced "southern belle" who was spoiled in many ways but wise and loving with her children, and her granddaughter, a teenager set upon her own needs and ambitions but dutiful toward her family.

Another part of the story is the relationship of this family to a well educated neighbor couple who "kept a tender watch over the comings and goings of the household." It was in their home that the granddaughter found a library she could use and encouragement for her studies. Eventually it was this couple who made it possible for her to attend college.

The gradual, unnoticed deterioration of the grandmother ended with her death. The response of the family to this event is well described. Also the empathic relationship between the grandmother and the servant girl is very poignant. Even the death of a family cat adds to the depth of the story in a metaphorical way.

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The poet describes a loving scene "entwined with you / on the long sofa . . . . " She playfully clips hairs from her husband’s nose as they listen to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Later the same year, he kills himself, "you were dead / by your own hand . . . / I have never understood."

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Gathered from four years of volumes of the journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, this collection of short prose essays and poetry written by health care providers (largely physicians) covers almost the entire range of the experience of doctoring, from personal illness and illness in the physician’s family, to all the joys and sorrows inherent in practicing medicine. Seventy-three entries make up the collection, which has been divided into six categories: The Doctor Trains and Lives His Life; She Relates to Family and Friends; He Deals with His Own Illness; She Relates to Her Patients; He Confronts Death; They Find Doctors Good and Bad; and Search for a Mentor. The longest essay is less than six pages in length and most of them are two to three pages.

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Woolf wonders why illness "has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." After all, illness is a consuming personal experience that brings about great "spiritual change." Why do we write only about the mind and ideas? Why not the body?

Woolf takes us through the experience of lying in bed ill; the world looks different, feels different, is different. "It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal--that she in the end will conquer." Toward the end of this short essay, Woolf discusses how illness changes our reading habits. We turn to poetry, instead of prose.

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