For shrinks, this one used to be required reading. When I found a copy in a neighbor’s moving pile last week, I read it through. Kesey’s 1962 tale of men in an Oregon asylum is still moving. Man vs. man. Man vs. society. Etc. And yet: why does it take misogyny and racism to realize…

Dickens exhausts–989 pages–and combusts. He begins with a consuming fog– the miasmatic chancery– and his characters are gradually consumed by the case or extricate themselves from it. Esther Summerson is Dickens’s great female narrator, but for medicine, Allan Woodcourt is the great physician who cares for the poor. “There were two classes of charitable people:…

Insulin comas, ice-pick lobotomies, and involuntary sterilizations– much of psychiatry’s history is cringe-worthy. Harrington fluidly summarizes the rising and dashing of psychiatry’s biological hopes. She leans too much on institutional figures on the way up and the way down (Insel and Frances, really?), but no one else has written this history with such scope. Her…

Peaceful protests have long been pathologized. Metzl, a psychiatrist and anthropologist, uses careful analysis of hospital records to show how schizophrenia was racialized and gendered. Black men were pathologized by psychiatry. “…psychiatrists should remain continually aware of how social contexts, historical moments, and violent structures shape perceptions of psychiatric reality.” Amen!

Diagnosis is a way of knowing. Steeped in biomedicine, I am accustomed to knowing disease as separate from the patient. Farquhar introduces Traditional Chinese Medicine as an alternative way of knowing where medicine is thought, where diagnoses are embodied, and where treatments bring every “discomfort and worry brought by the sufferer” into its “responsive web…

This one hits close to home. Large Catholic family in Colorado Springs with a history of mental illness? I can relate. The Galvin family is a generation older than mine and the story is far larger. Twelve kids, six with schizophrenia. Two parents, both with problems. Kolker makes this a human story and a medical…

Why do we not have enough testing? Ventilators? Contract tracing networks? Koch, a physician and provocateur, exposes our bioethics of scarcity as serving neoliberal needs instead of patient priorities. If bioethics was focused on flourishing instead of rationing, we would not be in this hot mess.

In pandemic time, we get back to the essentials. Our leaders should have remembered that: It is also necessary promptly to recognize the assaults of the endemic diseases… Hippocrates is the O.G. physician aphorist. Many are physicians by repute, very few are such in reality. The humours may be outmoded, but his bedside manner is…

Epidemics exploit public health vulnerabilities so, Snowden argues, every society gets the epidemic it deserves. When health is a commodity, you get a pandemic which is spread by the affluent while its costs are borne by the indigent. Devastating.

There are amazing folks everywhere in the hospital. One of them, a psych resident, gave me a copy of his “novel in ruins.” A pandemic proved to be right time to read it, because it is written in pandemic time: fragmented, intense, elegiac, and probing right down to the nub of things. We are living…