Whose Body Is It, Anyway? (From “Complications” by Atul Gawande)

The first time I saw the patient it was the day before his surgery, I thought he might be dead. Joseph Lazaroff, as I'll call him, lay in bed, his eyes closed, a sheet pulled up over his thin, birdlike chest. When people are asleep—or even when they are anesthetized and not breathing by themselves—it …

The Computer and the Hernia Factory

Excerpt from Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande Download PDF One summer day in 1996, Hans Ohlin, the fifty-year-old chief of coronary care at the University of Lund Hospital in Sweden, sat down in his office with a stack of two thousand two hundred and forty electrocardiograms. Each test result …

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Excerpt, Ch. 3 by Anne Fadiman Download PDF When Lisa was about three months old, her older sister Yer slammed the front door of the Lees' apartment. A few moments later, Lia's eyes rolled up, her arms jerked over her head, and she fainted. The Lees had little doubt what had happened. Despite the careful installation …

Mr. Delfour’s Other File (Soren A. Gauger)

The two men walked smoothly, effortlessly even, down the shimmering two-tone corridor, painted chlorine blue and surgical-glove white. One of the men, the one who was markedly taller, walked down the corridor with his hands folded behind his back, in the manner of an intellectual. His eyes won adjectives like "piercing" and "penetrating" from his …

The Practice (William Carlos Williams)

It’s the humdrum, day-in, day-out, everyday work that is the real satisfaction of the practice of medicine; the million and a half patients a man has seen on his daily visits over a forty-year period of workdays and Sundays that make up his life. I have never had a money practice; it would have been …

Chapter 5: M & M (Pauline Chen)

If you poke a hole from the belly into the diaphragm and with your fingers, clear away the cobweblike tissues that separate the heart from the spine, there will be just enough space back there to fit your entire arm. And if you put a small incision along the base of the neck, as you …

The Knife (Richard Selzer)

One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the …

Myself Healed (Richard Selzer)

I would make my own diagnosis. Without the aid of―no, in very spite of those miscreant doctors, stupid men who warm their arrogant fingers in the orifices of their unwary patients. Who knows what perverse, bestial thoughts oil about in their mean brains? And, ah, their eyes, cynical and professionally glum, that fend off good …

Opium: The Diary of a Cure (Jean Cocteau)

To begin with, I could not have been thoroughly cured the first time. Many courageous drug addicts do not know the pitfalls of being cured, they content merely to give up and emerge ravaged by a useless ordeal, cells weakened and further prevented from regaining their vitality through alcohol and sport. Incredible phenomena are attached …

Paper Pills (Sherwood Anderson)

He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left …

Chapter 2: Banting’s Idea (Michael Bliss)

Frederick Grant Banting, always called Fred, was born on a farm near the small town of Alliston, Ontario, on November 14, 1891.He was of British descent, his grandfather having emigrated to Canada about forty years earlier.* His parents, Margaret Grant and William Banting, were hard-working farm people, devout Methodists, and reasonably prosperous, sober citizens. The …

Making it Literal (Susan Sontag)

Immunologists took over a language saturated with military terms from germ theory in the 1960s. Now that these metaphors have been naturalized, their figurative origins go largely undetected. But as Susan Sontag shows, in her book Illness and its Metaphors, allow metaphors their head and we end up in a city fll1der siege, with permanent …

The Plague (Albert Camus)

Background: ALBERT CAMUS (1913-1960), French novelist, journalist, and playwright, has been identified with the Existentialist movement but steadfastly denied any affinity with that philosophy. He had a profound effect not just on French literature but on social philosophy. His observations on bubonic plague were drawn at first hand while he lived in Algiers. During the …

Chapter 21: The Development of the Medical Student

Chapter 21: The Development of the Medical Student Howard S. Becker et al. in Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (2002) We began our study with a concern about what happens to medical students as they move through medical school. This concern receded as we became more and more preoccupied with what went …