HumaneMedicine

Ward 6

by Anton Chekhov

This short story was recently released as a faux documentary.  See Medflix. 

Here is Ward 6 online.

V.S. Pritchett on Ward 6 (A review)  "The story, Ward 6, is one of the most intense, powerful and claustrophobic he ever wrote. He was eight months writing it and it runs to fifty pages. When Lenin read it in his youth he said it had made him a revolutionary: for ourselves it may seem to foretell Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward."  .

Got Poetry

This is an important essay from the NY Times that deals with the pleasures of memorizing poetry.  It serves to dispel three myths:

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn't enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod. You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.

Full article: Download Got Poetry  

Gitanjali: Yeat's Introduction

W.B. Yeats fell under the spell of Tagore's Gitanjali (Song Offerings) and wrote an amazing introduction in 1912.  In it he says: 

"I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.  These lyrics-- which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention--display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long.  The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."

Full Yeats Intro:  Download GITANJALI Intro Yeats

Project Gutenberg Gitanjali (Full Text)