HumaneMedicine

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

This is a spell-binding story of a Burundian medical student who winds up in New York City after the holocaust in his country.  To say much about the book would be to spoil the discoveries a reader will make.  It was reviewed on August 30, 2009 in the NY Times Sunday Book Review. 

From the NY Times: Strength in What Remains is Deo’s story. And what a tale it is, opening from a passenger seat in an airliner in war-torn Burundi, where Deo, then 24, is leaving behind what once seemed a promising life in Africa as a third-year medical student. It was 1994. Burundi and neighboring Rwanda were exploding in civil wars, in which Hutu and Tutsi were slaughtering one another in one of the 20th century’s most horrifying conflicts. With the help of the privileged family of one of his med-school friends, Deo is able to escape the carnage, bound for America."

Fine photos from Burundi.

On Classroom Reading

There's a new approach to course reading "in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading.  It is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on."  Read this fascinating article from the NY Times: New Assignment: Pick the Books You Like. 

This is based on program designed for high school students, but it applies to a class like this, too. The point of this seminar is to get students interested in reading about the medical humanities, not slavishly poring over assigned texts.  Of course, there are some suggested titles which you may enjoy reading and there are some strongly recommended..

PDFs

Some of this month's readings have been saved as pdf files.  If you can not access them from your computer, I have placed them on Google Documents.  Whoever wants access to these can let me know.

Poirier and the Canon

Richard Poirier, an esteemed writer and critic, died in August 2009.  This is an excerpt from a Times editorial about his significance:  "He reminds us that we should never be complacent about the glories of the canon, which is made up of texts as frustrating and unfinished as ourselves. And he suggests that linking and hyperlinking are no substitute for a sustained encounter with the great writers of the past, who were themselves both tormented and thrilled by “what words were doing to them and what they might do in return."  Download R.Poirer

The Care of the Patient by F.W. Peabody

This paper originally appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 1927; 88:877-882)  It is as valid and inspiring today as it was 80 years ago.  It is the most cited and revered article in the medical literature.  The JAMA article derives from a talk given by FW Peabody to the students at the Harvard Medical School on October 21, 1926.  After the talk, Peabody’s wife remembered him saying, “I am absolutely sure that this little lecture will be remembered long after anything of a scientific nature I have written has been forgotten.”  (The underlinings are mine in the essay are mine  – DJE) Download The Care of the Patient

The House of God

Written by a psychiatrist, Stephen Bergman, under the pseudonym Samuel Shem, M.D., The House of God  is based on the grueling, often dehumanizing experiences of an intern at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital in 1974. More than two million copies have been sold, and the book has been continuously in print since its 1978 publication. A recent edition (Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2003) features an introduction by John Updike, who ranks the book alongside Joseph Heller’s famed military satire, “Catch-22."

Since its publication, everything has changed and everything is the way it was.  A fine article about House of God appeared in the NY Times, August 18, 2009: Download House of God

The Soul of Healing (2004)

Deepak Chopra hosts this illuminating foray into the art of healing from the Best Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School and The Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California. Dr. Chopra offers suggestions for the healing process, as well as helpful hints regarding meditation, stress relief and releasing the body's "inner medicines." Divided into three segments, Chopra's program demonstrates the body's amazing ability to heal itself.  108 minutes

The fisrst hour or so is especially worth watching as it is a talk given to attending and resident physicians in Boston. This is available from Netflix and many other sources.

E Komo Mai

Welcome!

Artists (writers, painters, composers, cooks, architects) create works that inspire contemporaries and future generations.  Each of us will select works that resonate with who we are and where along the journey we are.

Where to we come from?...  Who are we?... Where are we going?... are the three eternal questions asked by Paul Gauguin when he painted an immortal triptych:

 

Emily Dickinson wrote:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample Nation
choose one --
Then close the Valves of her attention --
LIke Stone.

Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, wondered:

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn? For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

The Japanese monk, Yoshida Kenko, mused:

"The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known."

And so, you too, during this month will (mostly) read communications from others; but also, hopefully, will explore this valley as solitary beings or with others, listen to immortal music,  view art, and experience the pleasures unique (as far as we know) to sentient beings.

I have selected some books and poems to consider and invited a few speakers.  You are expected to engage with this material -- but these are only one person's choices.  Ultimately, you will walk your own path, compose your own canon.  Did not the great haiku master Matsuo Basho write?

Don't imitate me --

It's as boring as

Two halves of a melon.

 

References:

Paul Gauguin:  The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown and Co.  1969

1984 by George Orwell

Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko

Basho's Haiku, in The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass

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