Mafioso and medicine? There is an analogy between the two initiations, to be sure, but in Bazell’s page-turner, it’s a crass one. Medical knowledge is just one more skill a killer acquires. In the end, he comes to hate medicine– “The endless suffering and death of patients whose lives I was supposed to fix but…

For-profit prisons stay efficient by excluding the chronically ill and the mentally ill says @shane_bauer, who went undercover in a LA prison run by CCA. He documents how working there as a guard changed him. Food for thought: is the same true of working at for-profit hospitals?

Marriage plots hinge on status–allowance, house, title–but also: health. Before Emma can wed Knightley, they must conquer Mr. Woodhouse’s hypochondria. Emma and Knightley understand Mr. Woodhouse, anticipate his needs, and sacrifice themselves for their ‘patient.’ They have the character of true caregivers.

The cadaver is the first patient, the first textbook, the first initiation rite for a medical student. Poet-turned-psychiatrist Christine Montross has the best book on how anatomical dissection is a taking apart of one body to build up another. “With my first cut, I have begun a personal transformation…”

Medical science is advancing, while our psychological understanding of doctoring is regressing. So says Elton, a psychologist treating physicians in the UK. A learned reminder that physician burnout is transatlantic and can be ameliorated by improving both halves of the physician-patient relationship.

Physician burnout is a global phenomena. British shrink-turned-novelist @JoannaCannon just published the best burnout memoir. “The more often we witness small moments of compassion, the more humanity we see.”

Fanny Price is the most misunderstood of Austen’s heroines, but the heroine Austen understood best. In  one of the first novels built upon the interior life of a young woman, Fanny shows up meritocracy by living with “so much true merit and true love.” Killer compliment: “Her mind, disposition, opinions, and habits wanted no half…

To be sure, it is more Homer than Hippocrates, but the new collection by @ae_stallings has a Placebo. “If I’m a pill, then / you are double blind. / What you don’t know can’t hurt you. / Spoonful of sugar, / It’s all in your head, / this dendritic alchemy / of pain. Nothing works.”…

As Eligible showed, this could be a novel about marrying a physician. If so, the lesson would be that you judge a doctor as a possible spouse by the quality of his library. Elizabeth revises her first impressions of Darcy when she sees Pemberley and his library. Still the novel about judging and re-judging.

Socialized medicine? Universal healthcare? Radical medical education? Read the 1974 memoir by health equity pioneer @FitzhughMullan to see how it turned out a generation ago. They read Mao’s Little Red Book instead of Osler’s Aequanimitas, allowed community members to select residents rather than the faculty, and lived to see themselves become part of the systems…