Summary:

Aminata Diallo, called Meena, is born in mid-eighteenth-century Africa and leads a happy life with her Muslim parents. Her mother is a midwife and is teaching Meena her skills. But ruthless white men appear, killing her parents and imprisoning her. The eleven year-old girl is forced to march miles and miles to the sea. During the journey she makes friends with Chekura, a slightly older boy who seems to be employed by the white captors, but like Meena, has also been captured. They are kept at a fort, then herded on to ships and taken on an agonizing journey across the ocean.

Meena and Chekura are sold as slaves. They lose sight of each other and live on plantations in privation and squalor never knowing if they will be treated with kindness or cruelty. Meena is raped by an owner. She learns how to read and write English quickly (although her skill must be kept secret), and she is fascinated by maps, constantly plotting to return to Africa.

Meena and Chekura find each other and marry secretly - but soon they are separated. She has a baby girl. Her literary and midwifery skills are her salvation, and eventually she is sold to a Jewish duty inspector. He and his wife treat her well, and she and her child live in comfort, but the revolutionary war disrupts their world. Meena returns home one day to find that the Jewish couple have fled on ship to England, taking her daughter with them..."for her own good."

Meena moves to New York City, taking a room in a hotel and still intent on finding a way back to Africa. She writes the names and ages of the people clamoring to go to Nova Scotia as a reward for serving the British in the Revolutionary War: the original "book of negroes." The settlers arrive with hope and optimism, but they encounter more oppressions. Later she is lured by the attractive plan to build "Freetown" in Sierra Leone; again however, the promised resources never materialize and the fledgling community degenerates into crime and misery. Even Meena's attempt to find her original home is thwarted.

In 1802 London, as a frail elderly woman, the abolitionists treat Meena with reverence and curiosity. They encourage her to write her story, and there she finds her daughter again.

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Summary:

Two novellas are brought together. In the first, “Storm in June,” a host of people flee Paris in June 1941- -as the Germans occupied the city. They gather their money and most precious belongings and leave their homes, reasoning that there will be more safety in the countryside. But everyone has the same idea. The crush results in shortages of fuel, food and accommodation that radiate in ever widening ripples around the city. Many are duped by employers or by lovers. Some are robbed and even murdered by unscrupulous fellow citizens, and new conventions of behavior and bureaucracy are forged in the stress of the situation. The fortunes of several different individuals are interwoven in short chapters to explore a wide variety of adventures--tragic, miraculous, and poignantly banal. Among the most memorable is the little saga of the Michaud’s – a couple driven out of Paris, then back – all the while anxious for news of their son at the front.

The second novella, “Dolce,” is the story of the unhappily married Lucile whose husband has gone to the front. She must bide time in the home of her austere mother-in-law, Madame Angellier, who treats her with frank hostility. They are forced to billet a German officer. Lucile soon finds that she and the German share many interests in art and music; gradually the two fall in love, although they act upon their sentiments in conversation only. The full extent of their involvement must be concealed, but the community is aware and Lucile understands the potential consequences of “sleeping with the enemy.” Her mother-in-law hates her all the more for growing close to the occupier; yet their neighbours shamelessly prevail upon her connections to obtain minor favors.

When a local Frenchman kills a German soldier for allegedly courting his wife, the uneasy calm is destabilized. Almost by default, Lucile agrees to hide the fugitive murderer in her attic in bold proximity to her German tenant. The brave act is discovered by her mother-in-law who then (wrongly) perceives Lucile’s friendship with the German as a clever plot; her hatred turns to grudging admiration. Using her influence and a lie to obtain a pass from her unsuspecting German friend, Lucile escorts the ungrateful murderer to safety in Paris. The deception drives a wedge into her new relationship. They part never to meet again as his company is transferred to another place.

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Summary:

In this tale, told by an aging Silvio, Jean the miller dies mysteriously in the river at his mill leaving his young wife, Colette, and a little boy. Was it suicide or murder – and why?  Colette is the daughter of Helene Coudray, a woman Silvio once loved and still admires deeply, although she married François. They remain good friends.

Silvio is also friendly with Brigitte. She is known to all as the adopted daughter of Helene’s late unmarried sister, Cecile.  Brigitte married a much older landowner who dies, leaving her well off, and free to marry handsome young Marc Ohnet.  But news of the engagement devastates Colette. Suddenly it is clear that her child was Marc’s– and that it was Marc who killed Jean, possibly by accident. Colette’s angry father wants to press charges against Marc for killing his son-in-law. But Brigitte reveals that she is the biological daughter of Helene and Silvio; Marc is to become another son-in-law.

The apparently worthy Helene has deceived both her husband and her old lover, Silvio, by concealing Brigitte’s existence and identity. She also abused the goodwill of her sister who cared for her child. 

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In this autobiographical novel, written while the author was under severe mental strain and as she recovered from psychotic breakdown, Head tracks the protagonist Elizabeth’s struggle to emerge from the oppressive social situation in which she finds herself, and from the nightmares and hallucinations that torment her. Elizabeth, like Bessie Head, was conceived in an out-of-wedlock union between a white woman of social standing, and a black man--a union outlawed by her country of birth, South Africa.

Like the author, Elizabeth leaves South Africa with her young son--but without her husband, from whom she is fleeing--to live in neighboring Botswana, a country that has escaped some of the worst evils of colonial domination. But in rural Botswana she is once again faced with a constricting social system as the African villagers are suspicious of her urban ways and frown upon her individualistic behavior. Further, they bear her ill will on racial grounds because she is light skinned like the "bushmen" who are a despised tribe there.

Elizabeth suffers not only social isolation but intellectual deprivation as well. One of the few people with whom she can converse as an intellectual equal is the American peace corps volunteer, Tom, who acknowledges that "men don’t really discuss the deep metaphysical profundities with women" (24). During the four years in which Elizabeth is plagued by tribal suspiciousness, terrifying dreams, economic hardships, and two hospitalizations for mental breakdown, it is Tom, and her own love for and obligation to her young son that help her to survive this ordeal.

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In the eighteenth century, Europe began to take stock of the horrific infant mortality in foundling homes and hospitals. Infant feeding and care became a major preoccupation for charities and philanthropic doctors. Some organized systems of wet nurses in the communities and institutions to provide for motherless children. 

At the same time, syphilis was becoming a serious problem in newborns. The sexually transmitted disease, which swept the continent following the voyages of Columbus, was known to affect babies born to infected mothers. Since the early sixteenth century, doctors had been convinced that mercury was of benefit.

Founded in 1724, the Vaugirard Hospital of Paris was the city’s home for orphans. By 1780 it had made room for mothers with syphilis and their children.  Sometimes the mothers died, or well-off families would abandon their sick children. Healthy wet nurses were engaged to feed these babies.

Eventually, the wet nurses were viewed as a technology—a vehicle--for administering mercury to the babies through their milk. Many of these healthy women fell ill, either from the mercury or by infection from their charges. Nevertheless, the practice continued into the nineteenth century. The wet nurses did not know (or were not told) that the children were infected. The physicians in charge of this experiment also attempted unsuccessfully to vaccinate the wet nurses against syphilis. That experiment also spread the disease.

Remarkably, some wet nurses brought suits against the doctors or the birth families. Occasionally they won damages, and finally the law was changed to offer greater protection.

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A woman writer, frustrated by attempts to carve out space and time for her craft at home, tells how she decided to rent an office. It had to be simple and inexpensive. She finds a suitable room owned by a couple who occupy the apartment below. The wife, who will clean, seems delicate, defeated, but kind. The small upstairs bathroom is shared with unoccupied offices along the corridor and cannot be locked.

The writer sets up a card table and chair, and savors her few weekly hours of solitude. But her landlord keeps interrupting to offer things that she doesn’t want--conversation, a chair, a plant, a teapot, tales of himself, salacious details about her predecessor tenant, a chiropractor.

Conscious of her inability to be rude to someone who is being rude to her, she lets him intrude, annoyed with herself for not being firm. Determined not to let him win by forcing her out of the office, she begins to express her wishes. He resents these attempts at honesty, and she worries that she has hurt his feelings.

Gradually she realizes that he is spying on her through his set notions of what a proper woman should be doing in such a space – or any space. One night she returns to find him peering at her work, hoping, she suspects, that she has written about him. He hints that she has been using the office for parties and sex, and then accuses her of defacing the open bathroom with obscenities scrawled in lipstick. He tells her that the mess could not possibly be cleaned by his wife who is a decent person who stays at home.

The man is insane. The salacious activities of her predecessor must have been a delusion—and he may well have lipsticked the bathroom himself. She gives up the office.

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Summary:

Perillo's essays offer a lively, variegated view from the wheelchair of a woman with multiple sclerosis who is also a naturalist, an outdoorswoman, a wife, and an award-winning writer.  Not all of them focus on her condition, though observations about living with the disease occur in most, and are thematic to some.  Most are also laced with wry humor.  One comes to see in these sketches from the Pacific Northwest how full and rich a life it is possible to live while also fully acknowledging and even lamenting the loss of mobility.  She invokes Thoreau several times, and her work may be easily situated in his tradition of personal, reflective essays on the natural world.  For her, the natural world extends to the world of the body, linked as it is with the bodies of all living things.

            

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As explained in the succinct yet thorough introduction by co-editor Kimberly Myers, an international conference on the topic of "The Patient" was convened at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania in 2006. This collection of essays, which range from personal experience to scholarly literary critique, results from the conference presentations.
 
Of the ten essays, four concern personal or familial experience of illness. These four cover a vast range: literature and disability specialist Kristin Lindgren describes her story of the elusive diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and her coping skills; medical humanities and medical ethics expert Carol Schilling offers a poignant narrative of her experience as a mother of a previously healthy, athletic son who suffers a cervical spine injury from a skiing accident; Gayle Whittier places the story of her daughter's disability amongst a trio of nonfictional and fictional narratives of disability and illness; and renowned poet Tess Gallagher explores her relationship with and caring of her mother who has Alzheimer's disease. These essays, written as they are by women steeped in literature and writing, are not merely chronicles; rather they are infused with commentary on story and the meaning of life as story, journey and relationship.
 
The other six essays are likewise diverse and range from cultural/political studies from the Navajo to the Irish (which includes literary analysis of works by poets Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), to insightful critiques of literary works such as  Hjalmar Soderberg 's Doctor Glas, Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Brian Clark's Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Alejandros Amenabar's film The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro), and George (Marian Evans) Eliot's Janet's Repentance.

Consistent with the nature of medical humanities, the essays cross boundaries. For example, Whittier weaves her experiences as a mother of a disabled child with reflections on embodiment and literary critique. Gallagher compares the notions of time in poem-making with the necessity to live in the moment when caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's. She notes: "Of the written arts, poetry is most responsive to the moment and so coincides with the condensed time frame of those with Alzheimer's - which oscillates between the distant past and the present moment." (p. 71) Schilling tenderly writes of her family (for an illness strikes not just the patient): "We live the best lives we can, folding each of our stories into one another's." (p. 40) Diedrich explores not just the (at times infuriating) play with deceit in Lying, but also examines the ways in which patients lie and medical language obfuscates illness. She further explores, with great insight, expectations: of literary reviewers, patients and physicians.

 

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Wit takes place in a University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center. The main character, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a John Donne scholar who has stage IV ovarian cancer. Much of the action takes place in the last few days/hours of her life, although flashback scenes to weeks, months, even years before are interspersed effectively throughout the performance.

Bearing has lived an isolated life. Her love is her teaching and research. She is a stern taskmaster, perhaps "non-humanistic" in her approach. Similarly, she faces doctors and a medical system that emphasize technique over caring. She does find, in the end, compassion from a nurse who prevents the medical team from carrying out a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) attempt that she did not want.

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As the story opens, Sage Priestly, 17, is running for class president against Mona, whose popularity Sage finds both threatening, fascinating, and a matter that keeps her in a state of uncomfortable envy. In her efforts to "be Mona," Sage undertakes a drastic diet, changes her haircolor, and focuses all her leisure dream time on Roger--a boy she can't see is incipiently abusive, though her long-time friend, Vern, loves her in a healthy and faithful way--a love that is tested when Sage starts dating Roger and suffering actual physical abuse.  As we learn about her troubled social life, we also learn that at home Sage is a caregiver for her single mother whose bipolar disorder  and depression pose a huge and confusing challenge to the teenage daughter.  Vern's parents eventually intervene to help both Sage and her mother get appropriate care and oversight, and Sage begins to recognize in Vern (and his gay friend Walter, who has suffered his own social challenges) the kind of friend that will last.  The book includes an afterword in which the author provides a note from personal experience on bipolar disorder (one of her parents was bipolar) and abuse, and lists helpful resources. 

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