@janicenimura brings the 19th c. alive. If the future is female, it’s thanks to the Blackwell sisters. They blazed different paths through medicine that, although celebrated in their era, are far easier to see today because of Nimura’s work. A great example of how a good historian works.    

Why so divided? We maximize individual merit at the expense of the common good. So sayeth Sandel. And sayeth definitively. I dare anyone to finish this book wanting to defend today’s meritocracy. One suggestion: in his account of how to better college admissions, I kept wanting him to explore the NRMP Match as an option.

Reading Wright feels like a clean transcript of an explicit nightmare, which makes it all the more revolting. An expected virus caused an unaccustomed ravage. Why? Wright narrates the failure of diverse authorities– complacent powers, inept leadership, a polarized polis–  as a kind of Swiss cheese diagram for a worldwide adverse event. There is more…

Dr. Percival favors smoked trout, but he feeds his patients red herrings. Percival is a bit of a stock villain, but even stock villains have the feel of the real in Greene’s novels. Percival inverts the therapeutic alliance, giving the truth to the novel’s warning: “he who forms a tie is lost.”

Knowledge. Experience. Responsibility. Sinclair, a physician turned anthropologist, charts their reinforcement as the NHS makes students into doctors capable of being “On Take” with their “bleep.” Medical training gives you an education and a license. To get both, you have to learn how to “pathologize the world.”

Dialectical thinking depends upon close attention to details; so does doctoring. “If life were not so urgent I would be willing to spend a year talking to a great batsman, asking him questions and probing into all sorts of aspects of his life on and off the cricket field. If he and hit it off…

Shelley’s plague novel includes what could be a physician’s oath: “I am now going to undertake an office fitted for me. I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men’s vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease….”

Few of my books are tear-stained. This one is. I never met Brian Doyle, but I know him. Read this so you will too. Doyle exhibits the curiosity and wonder of the great physician, but with a paternal humor. “Remember–otters. Otters rule. And so: amen.”

Q: “Where were the saints to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” A: Dorothy Day.

Reread Ovid during Covid. The sprawling poem of change ends with Aesculapius leaving his shrine to set up shop in the city. When the serpent-son resumes “his heavenly form, he brought the plague to an end and answered the prayers of the city for healing.” Someone should name a vaccine after him.