Abraham Nussbaum

A book about a barber, but a med student advised me to read it as a kind of doctor book. Jayber narrates a half century of executives supplanting farmers, tractors displacing mules, backhoes replacing shovels, and a man who walks away into the woods. Not backwards, but into a better economy, of barter, care, and…

Medical training undoes you; it feels fitting that the binding in my copy of this memoir was so loose that every seventh page came clean out if I pulled upon it. And I found myself pulling because its pages were so finely-observed. Stein is the rare doctor who can see from the perspective of a…

The first couple of weeks of the pandemic we sang solidarity songs. Before we had time for a second verse, the choir fractured into dissonant songs. Working in the hospital during those days was disorienting as people starting singing angry songs at each other: I-VER-MECTIN! MASK-ING! Galea wants to bring us back together around a…

Paperback in the back pocket of my jorts for the last week? This reminder that the counterculture cracked-up slowly, then all at once. Lot of talk these days that psychiatry neglects meaning. Here’s a little account of the problems of a multiplicity of meanings: “One thing that makes me suspicious is that everyone seems to…

Genre is a strategy, Altschuler reminds us, and medicine has negotiated epistemic crises with a range of genres. Holmes made sense of anesthesia by writing novels. Rush imagined the sympathetic system as the republic. Poe negotiated epidemics with the Gothic. Altschuler reminds that we praise empiricism, but neglect the role of inspiration. It is fashionable…

Professionalization includes and excludes. The doors to the house of medicine for Black physicians, especially Black women, were barred during the Progressive Era. Remarkably, a few pioneers made their way to the bedside of patients despite many obstacles. Brown builds each chapter around the story of one of these pioneers. It’s a service to see…

Everyone knows someone with mental illness; few people have a friend who can know them from as many perspectives as Rosen knows Michael Laudor. They grew up together, attended college together, then set out on parallel paths. Laudor’s detoured into illness before ending in violence. The Atlantic excerpt left me in tears at the murder…

No matter how radical your proposal, John Chrysostom remains the standard Redistribution? In this life, and the next. Attacking inequality? No quarter. Poverty? Material and spiritual. Bracing indictment? For today and tomorrow. That’s the pattern: he operates fully in this world and in the beyond. “…remember this without fail, that not to share our own…

What if medicine had the equivalent of craft books? Alison offers alternatives to the Freytag triangle– exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement– for writers. Instead of triangles, she looks to nature and finds patterns–waves, wavelets, meanders, spirals, radials, cells, fractals, even tsunami–which some narratives are patterned upon. Breathtaking stuff which…