Featured Books: Archives
Location: Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: QH 81 G698l 1999
"You may say, 'so what, we are surrounded by a plethora of items, and we can't know everything.' But I am insatiately greedy and infinitely curious ... we should rejoice mightily ... every new item can instruct us: every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake." (p. 195)
The above passage from the late Stephen J. Gould's eighth anthology of essays reveals his passion for fresh knowledge and delight in the multiplicities of nature. Originally appearing in the journal Natural History, the essays in Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms demonstrate Gould's fascination with the mysteries of the natural world. As a self-styled "humanistic naturalist" (p. 5), he sought to explore "the history of how humans have learned to study and understand nature" (p. 5). In doing so, Gould linked questions in paleontology, geology, zoology, and botany to the humanistic disciplines of biography, history, art, and religion.
A celebrated but sometimes controversial paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Gould wrote numerous essays for a popular audience as well as scholarly articles. He refused to patronize his popular audience by simplifying challenging concepts, assuming his readers' wide breadth and depth of knowledge in science and the liberal arts. Awarded numerous honors, Gould gained special recognition for two books: The Panda's Thumb and The Mismeasure of Man.
This anthology contains twenty-one of his two hundred essays. Selected as one of "The Best Science and Technology Books of 1998," it confirms Gould's mastery of evolutionary biology and his appreciation of many other fields of knowledge. Never pedantic or ponderous, he imparts considerable scientific and historical facts in a graceful style infused with wit, humor, and irony. Literary allusions to the classics, Shakespeare, and the Bible provide universal relevance, while a thorough index helps reader locate subjects worth reconsidering.
Some readers find Gould's concentration on details distracting and tedious. He has himself admitted that though he uses details primarily to support his general ideas, he sometimes writes about details at length merely because he finds them so intriguing. Nevertheless, the patient reader discovers that despite the writer's apparent digressions, he invariably returns to his central thesis.
Gould's varied subjects include famous historical figures: Columbus, Boyle, Huxley, and the more obscure who nevertheless made significant contributions to human knowledge. Fascinated with the oddities of nature, he traces the evolutionary history of the dodo, defending the reputation of the much-maligned bird in "The Dodo and the Caucus Race." In another essay, he awards the denigrated sloth an honorable place in natural history, by demonstrating how this creature's slothful ways helped prevent its extinction.
In "The Upwardly Mobile Fossil," alluding to the anthology's title, Gould explains Leonardo's discovery of why and how marine fossils appeared in the strata of high mountains. In "The Clam Stripped Bare," he described Linnaeus's startling comparison of a clam's shape to the genitalia of the human female. Going beyond natural history, Gould sensitively reflected on human history, especially our capacity for mayhem. Savoring the double meaning of the term, "Diet of Worms," also part of the anthology's title, he despaired of the bloody struggles of Catholics and Protestants following Martin Luther's defiance of the Diet (the governing body) of the Holy Roman Empire in the German city of Worms.
The author often challenged conventional ideas such as the assumption that "old" equals "primitive." In "A Lesson from the Old Masters," he marvels at the elegant cave paintings of the anonymous Paleolithic artists whose realistic drawings provide our only reliable knowledge of the visual appearance of extinct mammals. In "Our Universal Unity," he debunks "one of the most common fallacies in human reasoning-the elevation to universal status of a local, limited, and potentially false belief held by an individual or culture" (p. 198). As an example, he derides "the assumption that human history should progress in a linear sequence of improvement (with Africans behind Europeans)," a fallacy he argued "may be the most harmful and widespread of all culturally embedded errors falsely promoted to universal truth" (p. 198).
Although his life was cut short at only sixty, Gould left behind groundbreaking ideas based on studies of the land snails, Poeciloznite and Cerion. In addition to his popular writing, he was best known for the controversial theory of punctuated equilibrium. Challenging the traditional belief that species change occurs gradually over time, Gould concluded that species undergo long periods of relative stasis until sudden changes (punctuations) occur in which they branch off with altered genes. In the anthology, he also challenged the long held notion that evolution implies change in a linear fashion, and ultimately leads to improvements in life forms, humans included.
Gould insisted that no conflict need exist between science and religion, coining the term "Non-Overlapping Magisteria." To Gould, science deals with facts, theories, and discoveries about the material world while religion considers moral meaning and spiritual values, an entirely different realm. Considering himself "a Jewish agnostic" (p. 270), he acknowledged that religion offers the comfort of belief in the sacred. However, Gould tended to side with Darwin, doubting the existence of "a beneficent and omnipotent God" (p. 297).
Nevertheless, he clearly expressed his deeply felt reverence for the splendor of nature and the inherent worth of all living things. Stressing that we are not merely biologically determined, Gould never lost faith in humanity. He emphasized our ability to act with compassion and nobility, despite ample evidence to the contrary. As Gould said in concluding his essay on The Diet of Worms:
The Cathedral of Canterbury is both the site of Becket's murder and the finest Gothic building in England. Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity; which ultimately shall we choose? As for the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise (p. 265).
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: WA 308 D556y 2005
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." Thus, Joan Didion begins The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her brilliant account of the year she spent denying the truth of her opening statement. In her grief over the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion clung to the delusion that he would return to her. Though the author witnesses his death by a massive heart attack on December 30, 2003, she later refused to give away her husband's shoes; after all, he would need them when he returns. In Joan Didion's "year of magical thinking," as William Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."
An acclaimed prose stylist and winner of the National Book Award for her memoir, Didion describes an unusually close marriage of two writers living and working every day under the same roof for forty years. She and Dunne each wrote novels and essays, but also frequently collaborated on screenplays, seamlessly merging their personal and professional lives. In chronicling her reaction to the death of her husband, Didion honors his memory, leaves a lasting tribute to their love, and contributes a masterwork to the literature of grief.
Upon first learning of Dunne's death, Didion was characterized by a hospital worker as "a cool customer," but she remembers herself in a state of shock - stunned and frozen. Ironically, her adult daughter, Quintana, was also confronting death that night. Quintana had already been hospitalized and, now comatose, she developed pneumonia and septic shock. Didion must struggle with both calamities. In caring for her daughter and planning her husband's funeral, Didion used the pretext that she was far too preoccupied to acknowledge Dunne's passing—much less mourn the loss. Her self-deception had begun.
Unable to accept her beloved's death, Didion was locked in denial, denying not only her husband's demise, but also her own grief. Her flat unemotional language, all the more powerful for its restrained understatement, perfectly reflects her repressed state of mind. Didion is very much a contained writer who knows that less is better. She wields a razor-sharp knife to pare down her prose until only the essential meaning remains. However, while control in a writer is effective, control in a mourner is not. Holding back sorrow, Didion deprived herself of the relief only acceptance can bring. Her heart was broken, yet she refused to bleed.
Instead, stoical and impassive, she masked her suffering, deceiving both the world and herself. Didion admits that during that time she temporarily lost her sanity. Running from her anguish, she hid in the fantasy of a never changing past, safe in the day dream of her life with Dunne. The couple's quarrels and reconciliations; their Malibu home; their excursions to Paris, Hawaii, and Indonesia; their stylish restaurants and famous friends – theirs was a rarefied life of privilege. Like Didion, many of the writer's friends distinguished themselves in literature and film. She once thought such highly successful, powerful people could "control events." Only later did she concede that neither her friends' prestige, nor her own, can forestall our mutual fate.
As a consummate reporter and writer, Didion sought the cold facts. Researching the pathology of her daughter and husband, she steeped herself in medical literature, mastering the technical terms of the physicians, once even appearing at the hospital in scrubs. She insisted that her husband undergo an autopsy and learned every clinical detail of Dunne's coronary. But despite all the contrary evidence, she could not allow herself to accept the coldest fact of all: no medical treatment known to science will ever restore her husband.
Didion delves into what psychiatrists have concluded about grief, finding their pronouncements artificial, pedantic, and insensitive. She mocks the doctor who speaks of "the patient's need to keep the loved one alive," not recognizing how these words describe her own state of mind. Oddly enough for one with Didion's sophisticated sensibility, she finds "matter-of-fact wisdom" in the common-sense advice offered by Emily Post in her 1922 book of etiquette. Didion points out that "Mrs. Post … wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, and not hidden from view."
Though Didion tries, her pain cannot be numbed. She stopped eating, but not writing, and in her journal she addressed her wounded spirit. From that inchoate record, Didion crafted a memoir, fresh with raw feelings. Ignoring the assault on her psyche, Didion rejected self-pity, noting that outpourings of grief are today often perceived as weak and cowardly. It took a year for her to understand that the truly courageous can permit themselves to nakedly suffer and openly admit their pain.
Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross notably concluded that the bereaved typically undergo a sequence of phases, proceeding from denial to acceptance. But anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one knows the struggle with loss is neither straight-forward nor predictable. For Didion, denial became her only way to mourn. Near the end of the memoir she tells us, "I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead." Joan Didion's year of "magical thinking" had ended.
Richard M. Berlin, Poets on Prozac, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: WM 402 P743 2008
The famous Welch poet, Dylan Thomas, once described the condition of being a poet as "walking over broken glass with your eyeballs" (p. 13), as quoted in Poets on Prozac. Subtitled "Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process," this anthology of personal essays by sixteen poets was edited by Richard M. Berlin, MD, prize winning poet and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In experiencing mental illness, each poet in the anthology suffered to some degree the lacerating psychic pain described by Dylan Thomas.
According to the editor's criteria, the essayists in Poets on Prozac had to be distinguished poets who published in literary journals, published at least one book of poetry, and undergone psychiatric treatment. Besides manic depression, the poets in the anthology suffered a variety of mental disorders including schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, post partum psychosis, and post-traumatic stress disorder. In collecting personal accounts from these poets, Berlin was interested in the influence of that treatment on their creative process. He attempted to discover how their poetry changed after the treatment and their reactions to the experience.
The editor's comprehensive introductory chapter traces cultural attitudes, and citing neurological studies, Berlin explores both historical and modern views linking creativity (particularly the writing of poetry) and mental instability. He reminds us of Shakespeare's famous line, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of one imagination all compacted," and that, according to Robert Burton, "All poets are mad" (p. 2). In modern times, the connection of depressed poets and suicide has been termed "the Sylvia Plath effect," named for the gifted poet who committed suicide at age thirty-one. Berlin cites psychiatric research confirming that depressed poets, out of proportion to their numbers, attempted or successfully committed suicide.
Berlin notes that a whole generation of 20th century poets including Plath, Thomas, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell experienced serious mental illness. Many engaged in substance abuse and endured their anguish with little or no effective psychiatric counseling or medication. Often, poets' attitudes toward psychiatric treatment have been negative. When the renowned poet William Carlos William, underwent psychoanalysis, he said, "I might as well be experiencing treatment by a frog" (p. 3). However, as treatments have improved, all the contemporary poets in the anthology found some relief in a combination of psychological counseling and psychopharmacology.
Creative artists have feared, and some continue to fear, that psychiatric treatment will inhibit their creativity, flatten their perceptions, and alter their personalities. Wary of her medication, poet and teacher Jesse Millner worried that "I'd lose my writing voice, that the poems wouldn't come, that I'd be somehow numb inside" (p. 67). Berlin explains there is even a romantic notion that mental instability is necessarily an essential characteristic of artists. He quotes the illustrious German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: "If I lose my demons, I will lose my angels as well" (p. 4).
Nevertheless, Berlin argues that empirical evidence suggests creativity results more from perspiration than inspiration. The writing of poetry most often requires a determined effort over time as poets laboriously craft their work, a process requiring calm reflection rather than wild fantasies. As internationally noted poet, Thomas Krampf said, "One can have a vision, but no vision is worth anything if one is too sick to implement it" (p. 39). Each of the sixteen writers told a different story but all their narratives revealed a common theme: personal satisfaction gained through creative achievement can mitigate the anguish of mental illness. The poet demonstrated estimable courage as they struggled sometimes patiently and often impatiently with the vagaries of psychopharmacology and the frustrations of counseling. Translator and dramatist Ren Powell recalled that she had seven therapists, "one of whom fell asleep during a session" (p. 51).
The poets had to endure the agony of broken relationships, humiliating setbacks, and debilitating self doubts in their struggle to maintain sanity. For example, Vanessa Hale, the victim of an abusive father, had to overcome OCD and post-traumatic stress before she became a tenured associate professor, later a psychotherapist, and a prizewinning poet. Fortunately, the poets' counselors and psychiatrists could instill healing self-awareness and prescribe the right combination of medications, enabling the poets to persevere, free of the symptoms of their diseases, even if the root causes may remain forever.
Far from romanticizing their sufferings, the essayists bitterly testified to the terror and shock of losing their minds, and most devastating to them, their ability to write poetry. As Gwyneth Lewis said, "After a serious bout of depression … I'd been unable to lift a pen, get out of bed, or speak for more than a minute of two" (p. 13). Nevertheless, she went on to become the first National Poet of Wales. It was most often their strong drive to reclaim their poetic voices that gave the poets the strength and resiliency, not to fully overcome, but at least to manage their debilitating illnesses. As Thomas Krampf acknowledged, "I would never claim to be entirely 'well' [but] looking back on it, I hope that the 'dark seed' of the experience of mental illness has borne fruit" (p. 39).
Frequently, the poets' subjects were themselves and their suffering. But, surprisingly, they rarely indulged in maudlin self-pity. Winner of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, J.D. Smith noted that, "Being a poet in despair does not necessarily make one a poet of despair" (p. 23). Nor did the poets use their disease to justify their sometimes self-destructive behavior. The writers came to realize that though they did not cause their disease, they, alone, bore the most responsibility for their own healing, not their psychiatrists, not their medications. They understood, too, that they could gain from their torment in better knowing themselves. As Lewis wrote in "Angel of Depression," "I'm broken, but my limp is the best part of me" (p. 13).
Though all the essays are infused with the striking, evocative language of poetry, some essayists succeeded better than others in revealing their stories and sharing their sense of self discovery. Perhaps the lingering trauma of the disorders tainted the writer's memory, inhibiting the poet from producing a narrative with a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
This lack of unity is not surprising, for none of the poets' stories are complete. Each will continue to bear ugly scars no psychic surgery can remove. Instead, they settled for a moratorium, using their hard won peace to earn respect from their peers and well deserved literary honors. In providing these poets with a voice in prose, Richard M. Berlin, himself both a healer and an artist, provides telling insights into both mental illness and the creative process.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Vintage Books, 1997. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Book Collection (1st floor); Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: WL 355 B337 1997
"Reflected in the glass, I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain." Jean-Dominique Bauby had never before described himself as such a wreck of a man. There was a time when Bauby seemed especially gifted with good fortune. Editor of Elle, a prominent French fashion magazine, he celebrated himself as a renowned journalist, urbane bon vivant, ardent friend, passionate lover, and dedicated father.
Tragically, Bauby's good fortune ended on December 8, 1995, when, at age 45, he suffered a massive stroke. Twenty days later, he awoke from a coma to find himself totally and permanently paralyzed. A victim of "locked-in" syndrome—absolutely immobile and completely speechless—he could communicate only by blinking his left eye. Trapped in the prison of own body, Jean-Dominique Bauby was now inert, an apparently helpless quadriplegic.
Nevertheless, Bauby remained alive, his vision limited, but his hearing unimpaired, and his mind lucid. That he still lived was no consolation. With mocking wit Bauby describes himself "reduced to the existence of a jellyfish." He mourned the loss of his glorified past, a life now forever spoiled. But self pity gradually turned to self discovery. Bauby came to understand that he might have been damned, but he was also blessed with a nearly eidetic memory and a limitless imagination. Instead of mocking him, Bauby's memories came to offer consolation and solace. Through his graphic imagination and vivid recall, he once more experienced many of the most gratifying moments of his former life -the piquant meals he had savored, the sensual women he had loved, the places and people he had cherished.
With all the audacity of the doomed, Bauby set about composing a memoir of both his real and his fantasy life in the hospital. After all, he couldn't speak, but he could at least blink one eye, and this he did, over 200,000 times. Bauby blinked in response to an amanuensis who recited the first letter in an alphabet beginning with the letters that occur most often in the French language (E, L, A, O, I, S, D …). A response of one blink signaled that, yes, she had come upon the first letter he needed to spell out the word he had in mind. Two blinks meant that, no, she had chosen a letter that wasn't the second letter of that word, and that she needed to try another letter. With admirable patience, his scribe continually repeated this tedious process, gradually helping him to spell one word and then another to finally form a sentence.
Through painstaking determination, Bauby ultimately spelled out enough sentences to complete The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a best seller published just two days before his death in March, 1996. In 2007, the book was transformed into a highly acclaimed film directed by the American artist and filmmaker, Julian Schnabel. The "diving bell" of the title symbolizes Bauby's sense of himself as oppressively confined, alone, and underwater. The "butterfly" represents his ability to soar, liberated from despair by euphoric fantasies.
Bauby was confined for life, the hospital his jail house, but his was hardly a solitary confinement. Loyal friends visited, doing their best to sound out his blinking responses. Bauby's dedicated physical therapist, Brigitte, comforted him with facial massages, laboriously teaching him to move his head, if only slightly. Sandrine, his speech therapist, whom he named his "Guardian Angel," struggled to have him ultimately pronounce the whole alphabet, an exhausting triumph for each of them. After his ninety-two-year-old father telephoned his speechless son, Bauby poignantly remembered their previous meeting when he had given his father a shave, for he was once the caregiver. With his young children, Celeste and Theophile, Bauby could take pleasure in being wheeled down to the ocean shore where he imbibed the restorative salt air, admired the dancing sail boats, and viewed his offspring cavorting on the beach.
Despite his losses, Bauby treasured life to the end, demonstrating how pure resolve and a potent imagination can triumph over even the most seemingly hopeless of circumstances. That Bauby completed an entire book is itself admirable. But his achievement is even more remarkable in that the reader is made to hear the distinct voice of a mute man. In a tone alternately sarcastic and serious, plaintive and joyful, Bauby speaks to us. The memoir is a tour de force, a moving work of art, and an affirmation of the human spirit.
Perri Klass, MD. The Mystery of Breathing (Boston, Houghton Mifflin), 2004. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: PS 3561 K63m 2004
It has often been said that "Even a paranoid can have enemies." In fact, anyone under attack from an unknown enemy may succumb to paranoia. This is the painful discovery Dr. Perri Klass made when she became the subject of a venomous attempt to discredit her professional reputation and destroy her moral character. That the malicious assault was totally baseless came to mean very little, considering its traumatic effect on the victim. Nevertheless, in writing a novel based on her experience, The Mystery of Breathing, Dr. Klass ultimately triumphed over her unknown adversary. Her novel reveals that suffering the most disturbing of ordeals can have a positive outcome.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Perri Klass was a pediatric Intern at Children's Hospital in 1987 and a prize winning writer. At age 28, she had already written two books, one fiction, one non-fiction, and published stories in prestigious periodicals. A wife and a mother, as well as an ambitious author and a dedicated physician, she managed to balance family life with her strong commitments to medicine and to literature. The young doctor took justifiable pride in her increasing success as a writer and her acknowledged skills as a clinician. Talented and honored, she seemed to have her career very much on a fast track to eminence.
Thus, Perri Klass was hardly prepared for the near undoing of an apparently charmed life. Without warning and without provocation, an unknown adversary launched a scurrilous barrage of calumny against her. The assailant began with a sneak attack, sending accusatory letters to her publisher, to newspapers, and to doctors and nurses at Children's Hospital. The original documents from which she was alleged to have plagiarized were never produced, but putative copies mysteriously appeared, supposedly "original" material that closely resembled Dr. Klass's own writing.
Soon, letters and flyers appeared on the walls of the hospital and in the elevators, attacking Dr. Klass's competence as a physician, and alerting colleagues and parents to the lethal danger of having her treat children. The letters, often on the stationery of prominent hospitals and medical organizations, contained misspellings and inflammatory language. At one point, the doctor's anonymous enemy even hung pictures of her in the children's wards to warn parents to beware. Soon afterwards, unwrapping what appeared to be a beautifully wrapped present, Dr. Klass discovered a gift of human excrement. Clearly, she was being subjected to an assault by a deranged individual, quite possibly a dangerous one.
A full scale investigation ensued, involving a hospital detective and a lawyer. Though it was soon clear that the hateful attacks were totally without foundation, they clearly damaged Dr. Klass. She felt violated, much as the victim of a rape might feel, and at first, she wanted as few people as possible to know what was happening to her. She realized that some might give credence to the accusations, and even though she knew she was innocent, she began to question herself. Like many other interns, Dr. Klass realized that there were times when she felt herself to be a fake, given how aware she was of her inexperience and how unprepared she felt to make the life and death decisions required of every physician.
Dr. Klass consulted a psychiatrist who warned her not to respond publicly, for this would give her assailant the notoriety he or she desperately sought. But Perri Klass was, above all, a writer, one whose voice could not be silenced. The attacks resumed and Dr. Klass decided she had to write about them. Thus, she penned a brave piece in The New York Times and allowed herself to be interviewed by the press.
Finally, when the attacks ceased for good, Dr. Klass realized that her tribulations were not truly over, not unless she could bring herself to come to terms with the pain she had endured. There was more to say, but as she later explained, she was simply too close to the experience to describe her nightmare in a memoir. Instead, she chose to write a work of fiction using a third person narrator, distancing herself from the traumatic events but gaining the clear-eyed perspective necessary to help herself and others understand the meaning of her ordeal.
In Perri Klass's The Mystery of Breathing, the protagonist, Maggie Claymore and the author of the novel share intriguing similarities. Like Dr. Klass, Dr. Claymore was a dedicated pediatrician. As a neonatologist, she was totally devoted to her newborn patients. Like Perri Klass, author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure, a book of personal essay somewhat critical of her medical education, Maggie Claymore was outspoken. Her frankness, and some might say, her arrogance, hardly endeared Dr. Claymore to her colleagues or to the hospital support staff.
Despite their similarities, Dr. Klass and Dr. Claymore differ in ways revealing that The Mystery of Breathing is clearly a novel, not a memoir. Klass came from an academic, literary, and liberal middle class Jewish family of high achievers. Claymore's background was more modest. Bright but poor, she was raised by a struggling single mother, a fervent Christian. Older than Klass, Claymore has no children and is exclusively focused on her medical specialty; the author's interests are more varied. Claymore, too, was cowed enough to keep a low profile, but Klass went public, regardless of the consequences.
We first meet Maggie Claymore as a practicing physician when she discovers that someone is out to smear her good name. For us to understand her character in depth, the author interspersed the initial story with brief chapters vividly recalling Maggie as a child growing up sensitive, lonely, and repressed. Like Perri Klass, Maggie was attracted to pure biological research, but both the author and her protagonist found themselves irresistibly drawn to medicine. The author convincingly describes life in a busy, big city hospital. With a sure hand, she sketches the setting of the ward with enough realistic details to establish verisimilitude but not so many as to slow the fast action of the narrative.
In telling the story of how a fictional doctor suffers an attempted character assassination, Perri Klass creates a suspenseful mystery, a kind of medical whodunit. As we come to know the various people in Maggie's world, we wonder exactly who might be pathologically motivated enough to perpetrate such a cruel and ruthless hoax. When Maggie is forced to confront her past, we learn that she has repressed incriminating secrets about herself. Though they are not known to her enemy, and are not publicly revealed, they are even more damaging to Maggie's sense of herself. Because, unlike the lies told by her adversary, these hidden facts were true. We learn that even the most apparently confident, seemingly assured person can harbor doubts under the intense pressure of rigorous self-scrutiny.
The novel reaches a crescendo when we finally learn the culprit's identity. We learn, too, how the experience of being persecuted has educated Maggie far beyond any knowledge she acquired in medical school. In this case, however, art did not fully imitate life. Perri Klass has harbored her suspicions, but her mysterious assailant was never discovered.
Of course, we can never know precisely to what degree Maggie Claymore was Perri Klass' alter ego. Both suffered the same vicious attempt to ruin them - professionally and personally. Similarly, though the author and her literary doppelganger may be scarred forever by their travail, each finally transcended her suffering and emerged stronger for it. Through The Mystery of Breathing, Perri Klass had the ultimate satisfaction of transforming her humiliation into a triumph through the power of art.
Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience, ed. by Neeta Jain, Dagan Coppock, and Stephanie Brown Clark (Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2006). Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: WZ 330 B6687 2006
An ever increasing number of medical students and physicians also are talented poets. While they were students, Neeta Jain and Dagan Coppock, serious poets themselves, decided that outstanding poets from the medical world deserve a wider audience. Encouraged by their faculty advisor, Stephanie Brown Clark, they obtained grant money, found a publisher, and issued a nationwide call for submissions for an anthology. From the hundreds of poems they received, the editors chose ninety of the best for Body Language.
As the poets reflected on their rites of passage as medical students, writing served as a kind of therapy, helping them cope with the many physical, mental, and emotional challenges of their training. The anthology is organized by the chronology of their progress. We hear from students in their first and second years, consumed by rigorous academic demands, from students in their clinical years, troubled by difficult patients, from interns and residents, exhausted by endless hospital rounds, and from attending physicians, empowered but humbled by their new responsibilities.
In Section 1 of the book, first year students describe unforgettable moments when they move from the classroom to the morgue. Richard Berlin in "Anatomy Lab," faces his initial dissection: "That first day I sliced off her breast / scalpel circling round and round, the way I might halve a peach / to study her glistening secrets." In "Apparition," haunted by the harrowing image of his first autopsy, Greg Chesney fantasizes "I thought I saw my cadaver / sitting in the mall yesterday." The would-be physicians begin to understand they now live in a shocking new province, one where life is tenuous and death is a matter of fact. Second year student, Michael Jacobs, worries that his studies may keep him from what is most important: "I want to taste my life/before it melts away."
The compelling language of the poems draws us into the world of those who regularly witness unbearable pain. Far from feeling rigidly clinical, Kelly Jean White finds herself overwhelmed by her patient's incurable cancer. Touched by the tragedy, she seems to temporarily lose her professional identity. "Leaving his room, crying / avoiding classmates / I take the back stairs / I find myself locked, coatless / in the courtyard outside."
Students in their clinical years write of routine ordeals: endless hours in a surgery rotation, disturbing days with psychotic patients, and long nights in obstetrics. Yet they find time to craft remarkable poetry. Sometimes sarcastic and ironic, often serious and meditative, the poems always sound fresh and original. Along with the tools of their trade–stethoscopes and syringes–the poets use rhythmical cadences and striking imagery, a poet's tools.
Often the poems dwell on the same sad subjects: pain, despair, death; reading many of them at once can be depressing. Despite some relieving humor, there seems to be almost no end to the suffering and misery. Also, some readers may be put off by the graphic if not gory descriptions of surgical procedures. Nevertheless, the searing realism of the hospital scenes cannot be denied. Indeed, the poets hold nothing back. The defeats, the triumphs, the tedium, the drama: all are rendered through arresting metaphors and authentic details.
We wonder: would it not be better for doctors to distance themselves from their feelings, better to suppress emotions that only complicate treatment, better to coldly wield the scalpel? The poets of Body Language, however, insist on experiencing their medical training not simply as students and physicians, but as sensitive human beings. Realizing the need to be clinical and objective, they nevertheless struggle to maintain their compassion and empathy. They sense that to deny their feelings would be to deny their own humanity and that of those they serve.
Medical schools now understand the educational value of having students reflect on their learning experience through imaginative and narrative writing. Faculty also include literature in the curriculum, and respected journals publish the creative writing of students and physicians. Courses in the medical humanities have increased and some medical schools have added entire departments. At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Humanities in Medicine (HIM) committee, collaborating with the Library, developed a Humanities in Medicine collection, posted a HIM website, and regularly sponsors poetry readings by such noted poet/physicians as Rafael Campos and Richard Berlin. Last year the Library and HIM hosted the editors of Body Language, whose anthology is another sign that healers can themselves be healed by the power of the imagination.
The views and opinions expressed in these reviews are strictly those of the author. Comments and suggestions may be sent to Harvey Fenigsohn.