Ulysses has scabrous obscenities, luxuriated profanities, extraneous details, staggering vocabulary, formal experimentation, and a performative use of  anatomical terms. The body is mapped by the church and the state, but also by medicine. It is the most famous novel ever written by a med school dropout and is, slyly, Joyce’s revenge on medicine. Joyce contrasts…

In 1902, Dr. Justina Ford arrived in Colorado. It 48 years for the Colorado Medical Society to admit her to its membership. This books is one of the three books written about this medical pioneer. It would be great for an elementary school history day project, but some historian should write a proper biography.

Colorado issued 3779 medical licenses before Dr. Justina Ford became the 1st Black women to receive one. It took 50 years for the state to license its next Black female doc. In reading about her for a writing project, I found this children’s book. It is one of the best resources about Dr. Ford. Next…

What is it like to survive a pandemic? A century ago, Porter was hospitalized during the 1918 H1N1 pandemic at Denver Health, where I work today. Her indelible descriptions of delirium endure: the protagonist “saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own…

Lepore– who else?–brings together the promises, and the betrayals, of our nation, in a single compulsively readable volume. She is a master teacher– learned, curious– who understands exactly what is at stake. She loves America, but also names the beam in its eye. One quibble: medicine may be a mote in the nation’s political history,…

@WriterMayaLang explores what it means to be the child of a shrink. Her mother develops dementia; she becomes a mother herself. Along the way she teaches us all: “What I know now about the river is that my daughter helps me cross it.” A loving read on being a daughter and mother and person.

People with mental illness deserve better: “For my brother, hospitals signaled harm if not outright hatred.” Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, writes about the failures of her brother Monte’s mental health treatment. She sees her brother in spit masks and restraints. She writes clearly about the ways law enforcement and mental…

Does any book better capture the mood and mind of a psychiatry trainee? The pretensions and doubts? Cole’s cosmopolitan flaneur observes “I was licensed to be the healer, and nudged those who were less normal toward some imaginary statistical mean of normalcy. I had the costume and degree to prove it, and I had the…

The physician as political prisoner, as dutiful dad, as traumatized shoemaker. Doctor Manette is the soul of Dickens’ great political novel. Yes: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.” But also: “My old pain has given me a power that has brought…

Why so few black male physicians? One answer can be found in the story of Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a remarkable surgeon who escaped LA for L.A. In CA, he found patients who loved him, singers who sang his praises, and yet he was shadowed by Jim Crow. It is one of many remarkable…