Abraham Nussbaum

We all get sad and afraid, but when does it become major depression and generalized anxiety? After you see a psychiatrist. Better than any writer I know, Aviv narrates how a diagnosis changes how a person feels over time. To get there, she mines her own history. She develops case reports that would make Golden Siggie proud. She makes good work…

The book opens after a visit to the doctor and ends, a year later, with a question about medications. In between, Ginzburg offers a portrait of hypochondria as a manifestation of status anxiety. She writes short and spare, like Chekhov, while sounding out how thoughts take bodily shapes. “I told you everything that came into my…

A novel whose explosive opening–”I shot him between the eyes”–unfolds into the penetrating injury of a failed marriage. Ginzburg astounds because she communicates so much without an ounce of sentimentality. It’s an anti-romance that asks when a wife should kill her husband. It’s also, slyly, a novel about being involved with a doctor. The narrator…

This book, but not the book, disgusts me. The cover attracted, the subject interested, so I bought a used copy online. Flipping it through upon arrival, I found curled cover edges, creased binding, folded pages. The usual. Then, on page 203, a line drawing, carefully done, a bas-relief imitation of the male genitalia. It was…

Puerile adolescent revenge fantasy… and I mean that as a description and a compliment. The narrator, a teenage girl going through all the feels, turns the tables on old Sigmund’s member. She videotapes it all, then a shadowy male figures pursue her for the SD card. The technology feels dated now, when every patient on…

It’s as creaky as the cheap RV they set out in, but the last of the Bascombe novels was delightful deja vu. While reading its pages, I met, no fooling, a Mayo neurologist who specializes in movement disorders. She envinced none of the accumulated weights from her caregiving that Bascombe carts around the upper Midwest,…

Want to read about doctoring through political strife? After getting crosswise with Mussolini’s Fascists, Levi is sentenced to the south. He hopes to ride out the exile at his easel, but the local doctors are compromised by their affection for the profession. Levi remembers one local doctor warning him about the peasants: “Everyone tried to…

A model institutional history, for the most-storied safety-net hospital. It’s got plutocrats, politicians, and pathologists. Coming late to this book, it also feels like it was plundered for a series of medical drama productions. It’s that shovel-deep.

One of my fave thing about used books is finding signs of the previous reader. In this one, found a United bag tag receipt by a family medicine doctor. A quick Google search and I realized our paths had crossed. Where he did stop? Page 142: “I can’t talk with you now. I’m busy.” (Solid…

Working in a public hospital leaves you with questions about how and why the safety-net was stitched together. Why are mental illness and renal disease funded differently? Why are grandparents and grandchildren in such different buckets? Did someone actually intend this bureaucratic morass??? No single book answers those questions in a more straightforward manner than…

It’s a winter read, for sure, brimming with bark-stripping broadsides. Ehrenreich was the polemicist medicine deserved because she disliked cant and commerce, favouring science and socialism instead. She surely strips away some truths in the process, but it’s a bracing way to get past the built-up lies of today’s healthcare industry. I only wish she…

Minor works from the major doctor-writer. … And yet, gems like– “His reading suggested someone swimming in the sea surrounded by the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by eagerly grasping first one spar and then another.” — capture the survival strategy of a doctor like me.