No matter how radical your proposal, John Chrysostom remains the standard Redistribution? In this life, and the next. Attacking inequality? No quarter. Poverty? Material and spiritual. Bracing indictment? For today and tomorrow. That’s the pattern: he operates fully in this world and in the beyond. “…remember this without fail, that not to share our own…

What if medicine had the equivalent of craft books? Alison offers alternatives to the Freytag triangle– exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement– for writers. Instead of triangles, she looks to nature and finds patterns–waves, wavelets, meanders, spirals, radials, cells, fractals, even tsunami–which some narratives are patterned upon. Breathtaking stuff which…

We all get sad and afraid, but when does it become major depression and generalized anxiety? After you see a psychiatrist. Better than any writer I know, Aviv narrates how a diagnosis changes how a person feels over time. To get there, she mines her own history. She develops case reports that would make Golden Siggie proud. She makes good work…

The book opens after a visit to the doctor and ends, a year later, with a question about medications. In between, Ginzburg offers a portrait of hypochondria as a manifestation of status anxiety. She writes short and spare, like Chekhov, while sounding out how thoughts take bodily shapes. “I told you everything that came into my…

A novel whose explosive opening–”I shot him between the eyes”–unfolds into the penetrating injury of a failed marriage. Ginzburg astounds because she communicates so much without an ounce of sentimentality. It’s an anti-romance that asks when a wife should kill her husband. It’s also, slyly, a novel about being involved with a doctor. The narrator…

This book, but not the book, disgusts me. The cover attracted, the subject interested, so I bought a used copy online. Flipping it through upon arrival, I found curled cover edges, creased binding, folded pages. The usual. Then, on page 203, a line drawing, carefully done, a bas-relief imitation of the male genitalia. It was…

Puerile adolescent revenge fantasy… and I mean that as a description and a compliment. The narrator, a teenage girl going through all the feels, turns the tables on old Sigmund’s member. She videotapes it all, then a shadowy male figures pursue her for the SD card. The technology feels dated now, when every patient on…

It’s as creaky as the cheap RV they set out in, but the last of the Bascombe novels was delightful deja vu. While reading its pages, I met, no fooling, a Mayo neurologist who specializes in movement disorders. She envinced none of the accumulated weights from her caregiving that Bascombe carts around the upper Midwest,…

Want to read about doctoring through political strife? After getting crosswise with Mussolini’s Fascists, Levi is sentenced to the south. He hopes to ride out the exile at his easel, but the local doctors are compromised by their affection for the profession. Levi remembers one local doctor warning him about the peasants: “Everyone tried to…

A model institutional history, for the most-storied safety-net hospital. It’s got plutocrats, politicians, and pathologists. Coming late to this book, it also feels like it was plundered for a series of medical drama productions. It’s that shovel-deep.