The power and wide range of these entries is informative and moving. While some are not sophisticated in literary technique, almost all are direct, clear, and insightful about illness, medical care, and the many ways that humans may suffer and that health professionals may attempt (or not) to give technical aid and emotional support.

Cortney Davis’s comments about the first anthology are applicable here as well. “Reading these pages, I thought that the group that might most profit from these poems and essays would be medical and nursing students, those who had not yet fully stepped into the world of hospital, office, and illness. These pieces might give them hope that they did not need to wall off their emotions in order to deliver good care; this anthology might teach them, in fact, that only by opening their hearts will they survive.” The collection may also serve for literature and medicine groups at medical centers and elsewhere.           

As the writers choose their topics and submit their entries, they tend to focus on dramatic events. Readers won’t find descriptions of well baby visits, successful counseling for health promotion, and other efforts not only to prevent illness but also to increase wellbeing. We don’t have pieces celebrating integrative and epidemiological approaches for the health of individuals, subgroups, and societies at large. Nor do we read about the excitement (and trials) of research.
 
Because many of the pieces reflect vivid events in the past lives of the writers, they tend, as a whole, to give a rear-view mirror look at medicine, not a look down the road ahead. 

The great value of the current anthology is that is shows the complexity and difficulty of medical care as well as the heroism of those who work in the field under difficult conditions.