Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Lucy: From Congo to Chicago

Rich Ratzan directed us recently to Lucy,  a novel by Laurence Gonzales, that that deals with "issues that are currently very much in the scientific and moral foreground."  I am reading it now (at his suggestion) and finding it absorbing, well-written and thought-provoking.  Here is an excerpt from Rich's review:

"Lucy is a novel named for the female hybrid offspring born of a bonobo mother and human father. The result of artificial insemination by her father, Donald Stone, a British anthropologist in the Congo with aims to improve the human species, Lucy is a very human-looking 15 year old girl. An American primatologist in a nearby camp, Jenny Lowe, finds Lucy next to her parents, killed by Congolese insurgents, and whisks her off to Chicago and enrolls her in high school, where Lucy excels at wrestling and meets a friend, Amanda Mather. After Lucy contracts a viral disease that bonobos, not humans contract, Lucy decides to pre-empt those who wish to expose her and posts the news of her hybrid karyotype on Facebook" Download Lucy Ratzan review

Rich Ratzan has a literary blog LITERATUREandMEDICINE that is a valuable resource.  You may contact him at:  RR Email.

 

 

Audiobooks: The Mind's Ear

I confess. I am hooked on audiobooks.  Have been for the past fifteen years. 

1. A fine article, in the Sunday, NY Times Book Review, addresses this increasingly popular pastime.

"Audiobooks are on the rise. Purchasable, downloadable, borrowable from the library, they are making ever deeper inroads into what publishers persist in calling (with touching optimism) 'the book market'.”

"The Minds Ear" is a short, eloquent exposition of this great gift: spoken books.

2.Peter Osnos, a writer for The Atlantic, has another fine article on audiobooks: "The Coming Audiobooks Boom."

3. Here is a third fine article on listening to books, this one by Jonathon Schwartz: "Wired for Sound."

 

Marginal Notes: Hemingway's Boat

 
In 2002, while working on a previous tome, Sons of Mississippi, author Paul Hendrickson hit upon the idea of using Hemingway’s boat Pilar as a metaphorical backdrop for the last 27 years of Hemingway’s life. He opened his notebook and jotted the following entry: “Hemingway’s boat. June 18, ’02. If you study what happened just on that boat you’ll get Hemingway’s whole life.”  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for 32 years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

Marginal Notes: Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs

It’s a fine spring day, the last of April. I’ve been sitting outside in the back yard all afternoon, plowing through Michael Collins’ memoir Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs: The Making of a Surgeon.

Throughout his medical training, while immersed in the seemingly overwhelming tedious task of rote memorization, Collins lapses into philosophical thought. “What, then, makes us human? A beating heart? A cogitating brain? Or is there something more, something, for want of a better word, we call a soul?”  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

Marginal Notes: Locked-in Syndrome revisited

At 43 years of age Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke which left him completely and permanently paralyzed; the only motor function he retained was the ability to blink his left eye in response to questions posed by his therapist.  His physicians diagnosed him with locked-in syndrome.  Bauby chronicled his inner life in his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

This past week the British Medical Journal published a new study which validates the quality of life experienced by a significant number of patients with locked-in syndrome.

It appears that even when our physical state is compromised, many of us are capable of enjoying a rich and extensive life of the mind.  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

 

Marginal Notes: In another country

 

Hu Jintao and Joseph Biden, Alex Wong/Getty Images

The young man sits quietly on the exam table with the legs of his trousers rolled up, exposing his bare feet. He dips his head in a barely perceptible bow when I enter the room. I glance at his toes; silently, they reflect the reason for today’s visit.  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

Marginal Notes: Precious Stone

 
In Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese gives us his best, exploring how the sins of fathers are visited upon subsequent generations, the intricate relationships between broken people, the history of modern medicine from clinical practice to the art of transplantation, the interrelatedness of human existence on this planet.  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

Marginal Notes: Expressing the Inexpressible

 
"Mark Twain" © Tina Berning

“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words!” Twain writes.  “His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself....The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written....Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

The Pain Chronicles - By Melanie Thernstrom

"Melanie Thernstrom, an accomplished journalist and the author of two well-­regarded previous books, suffered for years from chronic pain associated with a degenerative spinal condition. When an editor at The New York Times Magazine asked her to write an article about various treatments for chronic pain, the research became an obsession. “Why do some people get better?” she wanted to know. “Was there a recipe for healing?” The resulting book, “The Pain Chronicles,” is an expansive, invigorating mix of medical reportage, history, memoir and cultural criticism."

This may be an important book for chronic pain sufferers.  See Pathographies Blog fore more books on pain.  Full book review of The Pain Chronicles is linked here:

via www.nytimes.com

Marginal Notes: The Poetry of the Commonplace

In her recent New York Times column, Compelling Stories, If Not Literature, Dr. Abigail Zuger bemoans the recent outpouring of health-related memoirs. “Few of these efforts rise to the level of great literature,” she writes. “None of these books comes close to succeeding according to the usual standards. The language is clumsy and full of clichés; the dialogue is stiff and unreal; the pacing is way off.”

In my opinion, what Dr. Zuger fails to recognize is that the patient’s story, no matter how ineptly told, becomes an integral part of the healing process itself. >>more

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."