HMNT 325 Healing Words : The literature of healthcare: Reading List -- Subject

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweekas "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel toIllnessas Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic. These two essays now published together,Illnessas MetaphorandAIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

When it was plain that Cooney's once glamorous and witty novelist-mother had Alzheimer's, Cooney moved her across the continent in order to care for her. In bitter, searing prose, Cooney documents the slow disintegration of both her mother and the powerful lifelong bond the two had shared.

Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability to follow a conversational thread, the story line of a book, or to recall information she heard just moments before. Genova shows the disease progression through the reactions of others, as Alice does, so readers feel what she feels: a slowly building terror.

The first comprehensive guide dealing with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), one of the largest groups of non-Alzheimer's dementias. This newly revised edition provides the most current medical information available.

A collection of poems, stories, drawings, music, and paintings which show the varied ways artists have responded to medicine.

"This book presents the first comprehensive introduction to arts-based research (ABR) practices, which scholars in multiple disciplines are fruitfully using to reveal information and represent experiences that traditional methods cannot capture. Each of the SLX major ABR genres - narrative inquiry, poetry, music, performance, dance, and visual art - is covered in chapters that introduce key concepts and tools and present an exemplary research article by a leading ABR practitioner. Patricia Leavy discusses the kinds of research questions these innovative approaches can address and offers practical guidance for applying them in all phases of a research project, from design and data collection to analysis, interpretation, representation, and evaluation. Chapters include checklists to guide methodological decision making, discussion questions, and recommended print and online resources."--Jacket.

A candid memoir of love, art, and grief from a celebrated man of letters, United States poet laureate Donald Hall.
In an intimate record of his twenty-three-year marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall recounts the rich pleasures and the unforeseen trials of their shared life. The couple made a home at their New England farmhouse, where they rejoiced in rituals of writing, gardening, caring for pets, and connecting with their rural community through friends and church. The Best Day the Worst Day presents a portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Between recollections of better times, Hall shares with readers the daily ordeal of Jane's dying through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992.

In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweekas "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel toIllnessas Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic. These two essays now published together,Illnessas MetaphorandAIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

"Succeeds brilliantly....He lives as a writer and we are the wealthier for it."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Anatyole Broyad, long-time book critic, book review editor, and essayist for THE NEW YORK TIMES wants to be remembered. He will be, with this collection of irreverent, humorous essays he wrote concerning the ordeals of life and death--many of which were written during the battle with cancer that led to his death in 1990.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

To honor the twentieth anniversary of beloved comedienne Gilda Radner's death from ovarian cancer comes a commemo- rative edition of her memoir, It's Always Something-featuring a newly updated resource guide for people living with cancer and a tribute by Radner's former colleagues at Saturday Night Live.

The wide-ranging impact that cancer can have on a life in the months and years after the last doctor’s appointment is documented in photos in this meaningful collection.

In 1991, Middlebrook, a Jungian therapist in San Francisco, was diagnosed with premenopausal breast cancer and, after a mastectomy, told she had a 50% chance of living two years. In this spare and honest memoir, the author details the physical and emotional rigors of the treatment she has undergone, including radiation, high-dose chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant after the cancer reoccurred in her spine. Middlebrook ably conveys her resentment toward those who present a relentlessly upbeat attitude and refuse to recognize her feelings. Although the author's husband, children and good friends are loving and supportive, her mother and sister, who always shied away from closeness, are unable to provide comfort. At present diagnosed with stage-IV cancer ("inevitably fatal"), Middlebrook accepts, with both anger and candor, that her death from cancer is inevitable-while striving to keep as much richness in her remaining time as possible.

A "biography" of cancer from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. A combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms the listener's understanding of cancer and much of the world around them. The author provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

THE STORY: Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to the study of Donne

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and trained as chemist. Arrested a member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war, he was deported to Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his two classic autobiographical works, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE TRUCE.

At the edge of mortality there is a place where the seriously ill or dying wait -- a place where they may often feel vulnerable or alone. For over forty years, bioethicist cum philosopher Richard Zaner has been at the side of many of those people offering his incalculable gift of listening, and helping to lighten their burdens -- not only with his considerable skills, but with his humanity as well.
The narratives Richard Zaner shares in Conversations on the Edge are informed by his depth of knowledge in medicine and bioethics, but are never "clinical." A genuine and caring heart beats underneath his compassionate words. Zaner has written several books in which he tells poignant stories of patients and families he has encountered; there is no question that this is his finest.

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives-- what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Over the course of her education, training, and practice, she grappled at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, struggling to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure. Her rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a provocative questioning of how we should live.--From publisher description.

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed. In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation. Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

At the edge of mortality there is a place where the seriously ill or dying wait -- a place where they may often feel vulnerable or alone. For over forty years, bioethicist cum philosopher Richard Zaner has been at the side of many of those people offering his incalculable gift of listening, and helping to lighten their burdens -- not only with his considerable skills, but with his humanity as well.
The narratives Richard Zaner shares in Conversations on the Edge are informed by his depth of knowledge in medicine and bioethics, but are never "clinical." A genuine and caring heart beats underneath his compassionate words. Zaner has written several books in which he tells poignant stories of patients and families he has encountered; there is no question that this is his finest.

Dr. Sanders takes readers bedside to witness the process of solving diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis.

Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine explores persistent health conditions that resist conventional medical solutions. Using a range of rhetorical principles, Segal analyzes how patients and their illnesses are formed within the physician/patient relationship. The intractable problem of a patient’s rejection of a doctor’s advice, says Segal, can be considered a rhetorical failure; a failure of persuasion.
Examining the discourse of medicine through case studies, applications, and analyses, Segal illustrates how illnesses are described in ways that limit patients’ choices and satisfaction. She also illuminates psychiatric conditions, infectious diseases, genetic testing, and cosmetic surgeries through the lens of rhetorical theory.

I cannot ignore the reality of the body, its glorious beginnings and its subtle endings," writes Cortney Davis in this intimate and startlingly original account of her work at a women's clinic. A poet and nurse-practitioner with twenty five years' experience, Davis reveals the beauty of the body's workings by unfolding the lives of four patients who struggle with its natural cycles and unexpected surprises: pregnancy and childbirth, illness and recovery, sexual dysfunction and sexual joy. An abundance of solid medical information imbues every graceful line. Davis's eternal question to herself is: How do you help someone to not merely survive but flourish? In this compassionate and expansive book, she provides a template.I Knew a Womanwill alter your perception of the humanity of medicine and the ordinary miracle of our physical selves. From the Hardcover edition. (From Syndetics).

The phrase 'medical humanities' has a currency that is wider than any agreement as to what it means, though those engaged in the field usually know what they are attempting.
4 Volume Series : Symptom v.1, Diagnosis v.2, Treatment v. 3, Prognosis v. 4

"Seeks to restore the pivotal role of the patient's own story in the healing process"--Provided by publisher.

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust-despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides.

The doctor patient relationship starts with a story. Doctors' notes, a patient's chart, the recommendations of ethics committees and insurance justifications all hinge on written and verbal narrative interaction. The "practice" of narrative profoundly affects decision making, patient health and treatment and the everyday practice of medicine. In this edited collection, the contributors provide conceptual foundations, practical guidelines and theoretical considerations central to the practice of narrative ethics.

Yali's question: The regionally differing courses of history -- From Eden to Cajamarca. Up to the starting line: What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.? -- A natural experiment of history: How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands -- Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain -- The rise and spread of food production. Farmer power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel -- History's haves and have-nots: Geographic differences in the onset of food production -- To farm or not to farm: Causes of the spread of food production -- How to make an almond: The unconscious development of ancient crops -- Apples or indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants? -- Zebras, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated? -- Spacious skies and tilted axes: Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents? -- From food to guns, germs, and steel. Lethal gift of livestock: The evolution of germs -- Blueprints and borrowed letters: The evolution of writing -- Necessity's mother: The evolution of technology -- From egalitarianism to kleptocracy: The evolution of government and religion -- Around the world in five chapters. Yali's people: The histories of Australia and New Guinea -- How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia -- Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of Austronesian expansion -- Hemispheres colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared -- How Africa became black: The history of Africa -- The future of human history as a science -- The future of human history of a science. 2003 afterword: Guns, germs, and steel today.

At the edge of mortality there is a place where the seriously ill or dying wait -- a place where they may often feel vulnerable or alone. For over forty years, bioethicist cum philosopher Richard Zaner has been at the side of many of those people offering his incalculable gift of listening, and helping to lighten their burdens -- not only with his considerable skills, but with his humanity as well.
The narratives Richard Zaner shares in Conversations on the Edge are informed by his depth of knowledge in medicine and bioethics, but are never "clinical." A genuine and caring heart beats underneath his compassionate words. Zaner has written several books in which he tells poignant stories of patients and families he has encountered; there is no question that this is his finest.

"For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport," The Nation's reviewer of Justiceremarked. In his acclaimed book - based on his legendary Harvard course - Sandel offers a rare education in thinking through the complicated issues and controversies we face in public life today. It has emerged as a most lucid and engaging guide for those who yearn for a more robust and thoughtful public discourse. "In terms we can all understand," wrote Jonathan Rauch in The New York Times, Justice "confronts us with the concepts that lurk . . . beneath our conflicts."
Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets - Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well. Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise - an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

In Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to “fix” them. What needs “fixing” is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. He shows how this innovative approach is actually more compatible with what we are learning about the biology of the brain and genetics than the conventional model of psychiatry. Drawing on wisdom both ancient and new, he demonstrates the power and success of narrative psychiatry to bring forth change and lasting transformation.

At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child -- the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her. In this new addition, Lori Schiller recounts the dramatic years following the original publication -- a period involving addiction, relapse, and ultimately, love and recovery. Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perserverance and courage.

In her bestselling classic, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison changed the way we think about moods and madness.
Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness;nbsp;she has also experienced it firsthand. For evennbsp;while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide.
Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication. An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of enormous candor, vividness, and wisdom--a deeply powerful book that has both transformed and saved lives.

You may have read about the Longwood Symphony orchestra (LSO) in the paper or heard them on your favorite radio station. But the LSO is not just any orchestra. it began in 1982 with a group of talented Boston-area physicians, med students and health-care professionals and has since flourished under the leadership of violinist Dr. Lisa Wong, who became president of the LSO in 1991. The orchestra is now a proud, extraordinary group of musicians with fans around the globe. In Scales to Scalpels , Dr. Wong and Robert Viagas chronicle how the musical acumen of these physicians affects the way they administer healing and, in turn, how their work affects their music. What cognitive and emotional shifts occur when a surgeon transitions from the chaos of the ER to the discipline of the orchestra rehearsal studio? What's it like to make a house call to a poor neighborhood in the morning and then play trumpet in a jazz group that night? Does music heal the doctors the way the doctors heal their patients? How does practicing the art of music transform the art of practicing medicine?

To these seven narratives of neurological disorder Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his bestsellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.

More than 400 years after they were first written, Shakespeare's plays still offer a stunning glimpse into the motivations, desires, and deviancies of man. His characters are caught in situations modern readers can sympathize with, and his themes—love, family relations, adultery, power, treachery—are as relevant now as they were then. Surprisingly, another aspect of the Bard's work that has withstood the test of time is his understanding of the brain.The Bard on the Brain is a marvelous combination of close readings of Shakespeare and the most current neurological research that together demonstrate how impulses and actions originate in the brain.

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed. In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation. Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

David Lyons has written a powerful and moving memoir about his life and his struggles with MS.

With poignant insight and humor, When the Air Hits Your Brain chronicles one man’s evolution from naïve and ambitious young intern to world-class neurosurgeon. In electrifying detail, Frank Vertosick Jr. describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick’s patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain-the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft-illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

What leads a person to become a nurse? And what makes some decide to stay and others to leave? Hear from twenty-five nurses—from hospitals, private practices, and in home health care—about why they became nurses and why some have walked away. Edited and introduced by two experts in the field, who speak from two sides of the same coin. One is still in practice, and the other has left the field.A Call to Nursingis a resource for nurses, those considering the field, and anyone who wants to understand what makes a nurse tick.

As the healthcare debate rages on with the growth of the HMO industry, nurses quietly continue to provide the day-to-day grit and deeply-felt passion that hold the healing profession together. Within these remarkable women and men are poignant, outrageous stories drawn from the edge of life. But fear of career backlash and reprisals have made them reluctant to talk to outsiders about their experience. Now Echo Heron, New York Times bestselling author of Intensive Care, draws truths far stranger than fiction out of her colleagues--and allows the nurses to speak to us in their own words. Ranging from inspiring to tragic to outrageously funny, these narratives are real life medical dramas as experienced by nurses across the country--each practicing in a variety of specialties, including cardiac care, labor and delivery, burns, the ER--even a nurse who works in dolphin care.

There is growing interest in "therapeutic narratives" and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot.

In this deeply affecting memoir, Arthur W. Frank explores the events of illness from within: the transformation from person to patient, the pain, the wonder,and the ceremony of recovery. To illuminate what illness can teach us about life, Frank draws upon his own encounters with serious illness -- a heart attack at age thirty-nine and, a year later, a diagnosis of cancer. In poignant and clear prose, he offers brilliant insights into what happens when our bodies and emotions are pushed to extremes. Ultimately, he examines what it means to be human.

Cahalan, a New York Post reporter, chronicles her sudden bout with bizarre symptoms and behavior initially diagnosed as due to a gamut of psychiatric and physical illnesses. She reports on how a newly identified rare autoimmune disease (anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis) was ultimately determined to be the cause, her doctors' search for the cause, her slow recovery, and her attempt to understand this "lost" period in her life. Anyone who has undergone the diagnosis and test gauntlet can relate to her and her family's ordeal. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

It is a situation we all fear and none of us can imagine: a life-threatening diagnosis. But what if the person receiving the diagnosis--young, physically fit, poised for a bright future--is himself a doctor?

At thirty-one David biro has just completed his residency and joined his father's successful dermatology practice. Struck with a rare blood disease that eventually necessitates a bone marrow transplant, Biro relates with honesty and courage the story of his most transforming journey

Work overload. Constantly changing policies. Increasing bureaucratic regulations. These are just a few of the challenges health care providers face every day; challenges that limit the ability to provide excellent patient care. Marcus' insights will give health care providers new and essential strategies to rediscover the magic and compassion between caregiver and patient.

Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study, which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre as emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these "case studies": the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that "only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human."

Ruggieri, a general/laparoscopic surgeon and chief of surgery at a community hospital, details the realities and challenges of being a surgeon. He traces his experiences as a medical student, surgical intern, and resident; specific patients and cases; how surgeons deal with the emotional consequences of life-and-death decisions, surgical complications, lawsuits, and losing a patient; how patients view them as Godlike and how surgeons are fallible; the incompetent surgeons who continue to work in the profession; the unpredictability of the job; how he has learned from patients; and other aspects. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Not only for students and doctors, this volume contains Williams's thirteen "doctor stories," several of his most famous poems on medical matters, and "The Practice" from The Autobiography.

Delivering a baby, sleep deprivation, giving bad news, dissecting bodies, seeing death-the journey of becoming an MD is not an easy one. Join the author as he takes you through his four years at Duke Medical School. Through this book, he explores the world of medicine through fresh eyes and shares the serious, the stressful, the entertaining, the unbelievable, the struggles, the sick, the unexplainable, and the stories that taught him everything he learned in medical school (besides all the book stuff, of course).

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives-- what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Over the course of her education, training, and practice, she grappled at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, struggling to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure. Her rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a provocative questioning of how we should live.--From publisher description.

The journey of first-year medical students through the body's mysteries. With humor and compassion, Albert Howard Carter examines the minutiae of the heart and soul, offering thoughts on what it means to be a doctor and a patient, and what the dead can teach the living. 29 illustrations.

Doctors from around the world responded to an invitation to nominate their favorite short fiction and non-fiction. The 37 whole pieces or excerpts are presented in sections on achievements, discoveries, calamities, victories, and pure fancy. Authors include Plato, Neruda, Chekhov, Alice Walker, Hemingway, Doris Lessing, Hawthorne, and Le Guin. There is no index. A companion volume collects poems. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Dr. Oliver Sacks's books Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars and the bestselling The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat have been acclaimed for their extraordinary compassion in the treatment of patients affected with profound disorders.
In A Leg to Stand On, it is Sacks himself who is the patient: an encounter with a bull on a desolate mountain in Norway has left him with a severely damaged leg. But what should be a routine recuperation is actually the beginning of a strange medical journey when he finds that his leg uncannily no longer feels part of his body. Sacks's brilliant description of his crisis and eventual recovery is not only an illuminating examination of the experience of patienthood and the inner nature of illness and health but also a fascinating exploration of the physical basis of identity.

Chronicles the author's descent from a top cardiologist to a patient slowly succumbing to Parkinson's disease and dementia, including how he struggles with the feelings he experiences daily and the impact of the diseases in his life.

Robert Martensen, a physician, historian, and ethicist, draws on decades of experience with patients and friends to explore the life cycle of serious illness, from diagnosis to end of life. He connects personal stories with reflections upon mortality, human agency, and the value of "cutting-edge" technology in caring for the critically ill. Timely questions emerge: To what extent should efforts to extend human life be made? What is the value of nontraditional medical treatment? How has the American health-care system affected treatment of the critically ill? And finally, what are our doctors' responsibilities to us as patients, and where do those responsibilities end? Using poignant case studies, Martensen demonstrates how we and our loved ones can maintain dignity and resilience in the face of life's most daunting circumstances.--From publisher description.

The fourth volume of On Being a Doctor contains the finest selections of prose and poetry from Annals of Internal Medicine from 2007 to 2013. The selections bring to light the humanity of medicine in all its joys, pain and irony. We guarantee that you will be inspired, haunted and deeply moved as you read its finely-written content. On Being a Doctor, Volume 4 is the perfect gift for the student to seasoned professional.

A compilation of stories, essays, and poems originally published from the On Being a Doctor, On Being a Patient, and Ad Libitum sections of Annals of Internal Medicine.

It is a situation we all fear and none of us can imagine: a life-threatening diagnosis. But what if the person receiving the diagnosis--young, physically fit, poised for a bright future--is himself a doctor?

At thirty-one David biro has just completed his residency and joined his father's successful dermatology practice. Struck with a rare blood disease that eventually necessitates a bone marrow transplant, Biro relates with honesty and courage the story of his most transforming journey

A neurosurgeon's first-person account of his near-death experience after an E. coli meningitis-related seizure and seven-day coma will reassure afterlife believers, though it is unlikely to convince skeptics. Alexander's credentials are impressive: medical school at Duke and 15 years at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. But to agnostics and atheists, Alexander may not come across as a completely objective observer. He writes that he attended his Episcopal church even as he questioned how God, heaven, and an afterlife could exist, yet the heaven he describes seeing certainly seems like a biblical one; a typical line is, the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above. His story includes interesting asides about past struggles with alcohol and with adoption.

From one of America’s most renowned and beloved doctors, and best-selling winner of the National Book Award, comes a remarkable book that brings together the stories of doctors collected over 30 years. Each of these tales, filled with grace and wisdom, explores the mysteries and conundrums of modern medicine.

An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone

When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other. This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, the dark beast from David's past emerges once again-and almost everything Verghese has come to trust and believe in is threatened as David spirals out of control.

In light of the escalating costs of healthcare in the U.S. and the on-going debate about appropriate health insurance reform, it's easy to forget about the human side of medicine and the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. In Uncommon Wisdom, neurologists John Castaldo and Lawrence Levitt share what they have learned in their many years as doctors, not just from tests and labs, but from years of listening and learning from their patients. These 16 tales show doctors as human beings: flawed and full of doubt, wonder, and reverence about what it means to be alive.

With poignant insight and humor, When the Air Hits Your Brain chronicles one man’s evolution from naïve and ambitious young intern to world-class neurosurgeon. In electrifying detail, Frank Vertosick Jr. describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick’s patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain-the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft-illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

In this work the author tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is the author himself, a doctor who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. He explores some very strange paradoxes, people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper visual or who navigate by "tongue vision." He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery, or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? This book is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person's eyes, or another person's mind.

Work overload. Constantly changing policies. Increasing bureaucratic regulations. These are just a few of the challenges health care providers face every day; challenges that limit the ability to provide excellent patient care. Marcus' insights will give health care providers new and essential strategies to rediscover the magic and compassion between caregiver and patient.

ebook ISBN 9780226260143
Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us--they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances.

Living in the Land of Limbo is the first anthology of short stories and poems about family caregivers. These men and women find themselves in "limbo," as they struggle to take care of a family member or friend in the uncertain world of chronic illness.

This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies.

ebook ISBN 9780199759859

"Seeks to restore the pivotal role of the patient's own story in the healing process"--Provided by publisher.

The dozen personal essays in this collection, from patients and their caregivers, nurses, social workers, and physicians, address the devastating human results that can occur from a lack of communication and understanding among those in the health care profession. Medical error--much of it traceable to simple lack of communication--costs billions of dollars each year, in addition to the less quantifiable costs of the loss of trust in doctor-patient relationships and the decline in morale among health care professionals. These powerful stories illustrate the need to find ways to break these potentially lethal silences.

"Stories of Illness and Healing is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women's illness narratives - poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies - as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women's lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine."--BOOK JACKET.

Nurse and poet Judy Schaefer's work was first published in 1984. Here she selects a quarter of a century of her own poetry first published in 'Wild Onions', a collection which will be essential reading for nurses, students and researchers in the medical humanities, and all readers with an interest in poetry or healthcare.