Epidemics shape societies. Epidemics shape our stories. Early Dickens opposed sanitary reform, so Oliver and his compatriots are victims of public health reformers. They live under the New Poor Law and the gallows. Dickens will change his mind, but Oliver’s story remain his most vivid tale of how the vulnerable suffer at the hands of…

What do we deserve? What do we owe each other? Dissatisfied with current answers, Nelson excavates a lost argument– Pelagianism!– to show the poverty of our discussions. Today’s conversations about redistribution and reparations benefit from the past lessons. Here is a dissertation I’d like to read: translating these arguments into health equity frameworks.

Read @lsjamison one morning before rounds– “This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point–the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just…

Austen describes a nurse “… a shrewd, intelligent, sensible woman. Hers is a line for seeing human nature; and she has a fund of good sense and observation which, as a companion, make her infinitely superior to thousands of those who having only received ‘the best education in the world,’ know nothing worth attending to.”…

Rosenberg spent 5+ years following persons with serious mental illness. Our society allows them to disappear onto streets, jails, and early graves. If you know someone with a serious mental illness– and you do!– the Practical Advice at the end is helpful.

To die well, you have to live well. If a doctor can help, they must draw attention to finitude instead of distracting from finitiude. As you contemplate your finitude, Dugdale is the doctor you want on the journey. She reclaims ancient wisdom for contemporary hospitals. Her words, and the woodcuts at the end, are a…

Henry Tilney describes courtship, but understands the physician-patient relationship:”We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other.”

Most physicians are telling burnout stories– this is how the work is killing me– these days. Bartolo writes “because I do not want them to be forgotten.” Although trained as an obstetrician, Bartolo takes care of all who wash up on the shores of his island. A beautiful example of how true doctoring means opening…

Suicide silences. Suicide leaves behind. In the silence and absence, friendships are made (and remade) in Nunez’s elegant and wise novel. She asks “What we miss–what we lose and what we mourn–isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.” Stunning.

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…