Summary:

The author of this long, compassionate and often startling treatise on identity interviewed over three hundred families to elicit stories about raising exceptional children, stories that also come from these exceptional children ('exceptional' is the term chosen to describe the children in the author's material about the book).

'Far From The Tree' explores the challenges children face in being raised in families where one prominent feature in their identity is forged by something out of their parents' control and generally not part of the family's experience until then. These identities are not 'vertical' (passed down from generations of parents to their children), but 'horizontal', springing up between those who share in that identity at any one time. Solomon begins by wondering about his own relationship with his parents when he was a child discovering his sexuality and ends with his own role as a father, 'the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility' (702); between the two poles of his own experience, he meets parents and children who have experienced deafness, dwarfism, autism, schizophrenia, severe physical disabilities and diverse gender identities, prodigies, children who were concieved by rape and children who became criminal.  

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Jacob Needleman, a philosopher concerned with "applying philosophy to the questions of everyday life," taught medical ethics at San Francisco State University (SFSU). In this highly personal book he addresses what it means to be a "good doctor" and the role of physicians in contemporary society. The book is structured as a series of imaginary letters addressed to his childhood idol, the physician who treated him when he was 12 years old.

The aged Dr. Kaufman responds to these letters, although we see only the philosopher’s side of the correspondence. Toward the end of the book, Needleman makes a pilgrimage to Philadelphia to visit his ailing mentor. They talk for a while, then when the old man takes a nap, Needleman spends the rest of the day conversing with Dr. Kaufman’s daughter, a pediatrician who in some sense represents the "good" medicine of the future, just as her father represented the "good" medicine of the past.

In these letters the author addresses the deep questions of character and motivation in the form of a personal narrative. He recalls his experiences as a boy, his ambition to become a doctor, and several incidents from his life as an autopsy assistant and hospital orderly. For example, there is the bizarre story of the young man transporting an amputated leg by elevator; he accidentally drops the leg to the floor and the wrappings flip open, much to the astonishment of others on the elevator.

"People don’t trust science; people trust people." (p. 15) Similarly, Jacob Needleman writes, people don’t trust or distrust medicine as an institution; they trust or distrust doctors. "To be a good doctor, one must first of all be a good (person). And to be a good (person) one has to begin by discovering in oneself the desire for truth . . . truth is the only effective force." (p. 68)

To facilitate this quest for truth, Needleman describes in these letters a four-seminar sequence he teaches at SFSU: "To whom is the physician responsible?," "The art of living and the art of medicine," "Care," and "The financial disease of modern medicine." (pp. 71-72) Through these seminars the author hopes to re-awaken in prospective physicians the quest for truth, and the possibility of care, that he believes have been submerged by technology and infected by the financial disease. Dr. Kaufman’s daughter serves as a real-life example of the possibility of cultivating the contemporary version of the "good doctor."

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First published in France as a six-volume series from 1996-2003, this narrative is often referred to as an autobiographical graphic novel, but it is more accurately described as a graphic memoir. The author, born Pierre-François Beauchard, tells and draws the story of his family's life with the author's older brother, Jean-Christophe, whom we meet on the first page, in the year 1994: "It takes a moment for me to recognize the guy who just walked in. It's my brother . . . The back of his head is bald, from all the times he's fallen. He's enormously bloated from medication and lack of exercise." Flashback to 1964 when the author is five years old and his seven-year-old brother begins to have frequent grand mal epilepsy seizures. There follows the parents' mostly fruitless search for treatment to control the seizures, including: possible brain surgery which Jean-Christophe refuses in favor of an attempt at zen macrobiotics (this seems to work for six-months), consultation with a psychic, Swedenborgian spiritualism, magnetism, alchemy, exorcism by a priest, psychiatry (a different form of exorcism!).

Jean-Christophe's illness transforms family life as other children mock and fear the boy, the family moves to an isolated area, joins communes, and attempts to cope with Jean-Christophe's increasingly disturbed and disturbing behavior that alternates between passivity and physical aggression. The author has vivid visions and dreams and changes his name to David ("a symbolic act. I've won the war [against the threat of acquiring epilepsy" (164)]; his sister Florence suffers from constant anxiety; his mother grieves for many months after her father dies. As an adolescent and young man Jean-Christophe spends time in several institutions for handicapped individuals as well as at home, where he lives a desultory existence that is interspersed with violence toward the author and his father.

David escapes to Paris, living in a studio apartment paid for by his father, reading, writing stories, drawing, and attending classes at the Duperre School of Applied Arts. "I had to draw and write constantly. I had to fill my time in order to prevent my brother's disease from reaching me" (276). He is lonely but avoids people, feels guilty for neglecting his brother and ‘picking on' him yet is fearful that he too will be taken over by epilepsy, or death. Equally upsetting is when David discovers writings by Jean-Christophe: "He speaks of his despair and loneliness and the words might as well have come from my pen" (316). On and off, in moving displays of empathy, the author attempts to understand what happens to his brother during the seizures -- is he conscious, where does he go, does he die temporarily?

Within the narrative are intercalated multigenerational family histories that include two world wars, and European philosophical and cultural movements that influenced his parents and their search for treatments. The final section of Epileptic relates in words and images the author's adult life as he becomes a commercial artist; struggles through several relationships with women; his own infertility; his ever-present confusion, anger, and misery about his brother's illness; and his founding with five colleagues of the independent publishing house, L'Association: "It's the creation of L'Association that saves me" (327).

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"A Diary Without Dates" is Enid Bagnold's World War I memoir of her experiences over roughly a year and a half as a member of the V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment), or what we would today call a nurse's aide. Assisting the Sisters (both lay and religious nurses), the author attended to the day-to-day (mostly non-clinical) needs of wounded soldiers (almost entirely British) recovering from often horrific wounds in the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, 8 miles southeast of London. These poor men often stayed in the Royal Herbert for many months. It is a slim volume which the author wrote at the age of 28 and published in 1918. Divided into three arbitrary divisions ("Outside the Glass Doors", "Inside the Glass Doors", "'The Boys ...'") of roughly equal content (the last devotes, on the whole, more detail to individual "Tommies", referred to as "The Boys"), the book recounts the author's observations and fairly critical views of the relationships between nurses, physicians, V.A.D's, and visitors. Apparently the book was not well received by war authorities, leading to Bagnold's dismissal from her position.

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Each chapter in this book explores the forms and effects of humor in healthcare, mostly in hospital settings, beginning with a touching account of a person who worked as a hospital clown, visiting patients, enlivening staff, haunting the halls of a hospital where she became a beloved and important reminder that the disruptions of illness can be reframed in ways that make them more tolerable and bring patients back into communities from which they often feel exiled.  In subsequent chapters Carter, who himself went through cancer treatment, and writes from that experience as well as from his experience as a volunteer in an ER, draws from his compendious collection of medical jokes and stories to provide examples of the kinds of humor that help nurses and doctors, as well as patients and their families, get through the days.  Some of it is edgy and ironic, some broad and slapstick, some wordplay that helps to domesticate the often alienating discourse of clinical medicine.  His point is to provide some analytical categories and ways of understanding the kinds of humor that can be helpful-not simply to share a collection of jokes and stories, but the book does, especially in the final chapters, provide a sizeable collection of those, ranging from puns (including what he calls "groaners") to patient stories that in various ways turn medicine on its head.

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The pediatrician-author of this autobiography was the first Jewish professor of medicine at the prestigious McGill University.

Born in Montreal in 1890, Alton was an only child whose immigrant father was an itinerant merchant with somewhat shady dealings. The shy boy developed hemoptysis and was sent away from home and family to the healthier air of Denver on the erroneous suspicion of tuberculosis.

He overcame shyness and found an ability to speak in acting and “declaiming” passages from Shakespeare. Literature remained a lifelong passion. Notwithstanding the quotas on Jewish students, he attended McGill medical school, followed by residency in the United States where he encountered many luminaries of twentieth-century pediatrics.  

Upon his return to Montreal, he confronted entrenched anti-semitism, but was instrumental in founding the Jewish General Hospital and a children’s hospital. He witnessed exciting medical discoveries and, like many other pediatricians, championed initiatives for child health that relied on social intervention.

The book closes with a few case histories of small patients, many of whom fell ill because of parental and societal ignorance.

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The writer opens the volume by discussing the ways in which the poetry created by the affected person differs from the narrative form of describing the experience of illness—the classic “pathography.”  The essays in the collection demonstrate, by using examples, some of the unique qualities of the poem as an alternative to a prose narrative progression as well as the ambiguities introduced by the language of poetry. The discussions of the poetry presented provide the reader with guidance to the acceptance of poems in their “own terms” in order to understand the poet’s internal sense of the meaning of illness.  By allowing new and different information to become available for consideration the careful reader may gain new insights into the lives of those who are ill or disabled.

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The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) conducted an affair with her doctor, gynecologist Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918) in the decade before he married. They remained friends, and she always called him her Docteur Dieu (doctor god).

The handsome physician was a leading light in French gynecology and in the Paris arts community. Clad in his red dressing gown, Pozzi was the subject of John Singer Sargent's wonderful portrait (1881), which spawned erotic legends about him.

At first happy, Pozzi’s marriage degenerated into coldness, but his wife would not grant him a divorce. He then established a long-standing, public relationship with Emma Fischhof. During the Dreyfus affair, which unmasked the horror of entrenched anti-Semitism in France, physician and actress both fought against the ill treatment of the Jewish officer.

In 1915 and at Sarah’s insistence, Pozzi amputated her painful leg. Three years later, he was shot and killed by a disgruntled and delusional patient who blamed him for a minor illness.

 

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The author was the first blind physician to be licensed in Canada. Her autobiography is also an autopathography.

From her anger over developing severe diabetes as a teenager, through her relentless pursuit of a scientific degree and medical school, through a brief failed marriage – followed by the tragedy of completely losing her sight while still in training, to a rewarding and responsible career as a palliative care physician and educator.

Sustained by her religious faith and by loyal family members and friends, Poulson explains choices, compromises and supports that allowed her to continue studying and working in Montreal and later in Toronto.

Her complications from diabetes were numerous, and included heart disease for which she required surgery. Then she developed breast cancer, which eventually metastasized. In closing her narrative, she knows it will likely take her life.

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