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…

“Stick to Facts, sir!” Gradgrind’s declaration is often cited without the irony. Education is less about transmitting facts than kindling imagination, less about transaction than relationship. “It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody…

Benjamin Franklin wrote the formative rags-to-riches story. It is one American story of merit, but was for decades the story. His sister Jane Franklin lived a different American story of de-merit, and Lepore reclaims her story as the more common story. With Lepore’s help, I fell in love with Jane.

OT: Found the 1st novel by @modaviau while looking for a vacation read. As a Gen X former college deejay turned shrink, novels named after Sebadoh lyrics and mental disorders call to me. I needed this one for lines like: “I began to cry. I’d helped to make an entire generation of young people’s lives…

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…