2008 Physicians Literature & Medicine Group

January 9

February 13

 March 5

 April 2

 May 7

 June 4

Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by Nobel-prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, chronicles the half century of love entwining three characters: Florentino, a poet and businessman who has remained unmarried and in love with Fermina, who has had a long, reasonably satisfying marriage to Juvenal, a prominent physician and an illustrious man. After fifty years of unrequited passion, Florentino declares his love once again to Fermina, now a widow. The pair finally become lovers on a boat, cruising up a river without cargo or passengers and flying a yellow plague flag in order to avoid every port and all human contact. In its final pages, this novel explores a great unspoken in our youth-oriented American culture: sexual intimacy between two old people. Well beyond the frantic energies and perilous insecurities of youthful passion, Florentino and Fermina can realize that "they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

 July 9

Book: Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, S Heen
Facilitator: Aden Ross, PhD

The book selection for July, Difficult Conversations, constitutes an experimental departure from our usual discussions in the Literature and Medicine series. This text suggests ways for discussing challenging topics with colleagues, family members and friends. Obviously, medicine presents myriad challenges in communication with patients and fellow professionals, but this book can also be extremely useful in everyday situations. Among other things, it facilitates identifying assumptions and emotions underlying most conversations, interpreting both what is said and not said, and listening to yourself as well as others.
As you read about the events, feelings and identities involved in most conversations, think of one or two examples of difficult conversations you have had (or still face) and bring them with you to our meeting. Instead of merely discussing this book, we will try to apply its suggestions to our own real-life situations.”

 August 6

The Second Coming, by Walker Percy, is a novel at once unexpectedly comic and genuinely profound. The main character, Will Barrett, suffers from an unusual illness which causes depression, at times suicidal. In addition, a childhood trauma involving his father has unconsciously forced him into choices he feels compelled to make. At this point, he meets an escapee from a mental hospital whose quirky life and poetic language teach him valuable lessons about memory, himself and God. In all these contexts, a "second coming" means something different and something vital.

Walker Percy trained as a physician and viewed the novelist as a diagnostician of social malaise. What cultural illnesses do you think this novel diagnoses? Can literature help to treat or cure those illnesses? If so, how?

 September 3

The American writer Andrea Barrett is known for her fascinating stories about characters confronting scientific developments in their personal lives. In her latest novel, The Air We Breathe, the United States is preparing to enter World War I and a diverse group of Americans—rich and poor, native-born and immigrants—are thrown together by their common disease, tuberculosis. In a remote sanatorium in upstate New York, with nothing to do but “rest,” these TB patients have no one but each other for stimulus and company. Patients and medical professionals interact, love quadrangles form, gossip breeds political paranoia, and, ultimately, worlds collide with tragic consequences. Readers will enjoy Barrett's thorough research into the political and medical climates of the time, and many have recognized parallels between America as it prepared for World War I, and America post 9/11.

 October 1

Raymond Carver is regarded as one of America’s best short story writers. In a spare style, he wrote of the struggles—financial, emotional, physical—of lower-middle class characters, drawn from the world in which he grew up. Yet his stories are beautiful in their honesty and the humanity ultimately revealed. Where I’m Calling From, nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 1988 shortly before Carver died of lung cancer at age 50. The collection encompasses stories from his earlier books as well as seven new ones. In our discussion, we’ll focus on: ”Fat,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Where I’m Calling From,” “Cathedral,” “A Small Good Thing,” “Boxes,” and “Errand.” This final story centers on Chekhov to whom Carver often is compared. The Russian writer’s influence wasn’t limited to the short story, however. Chekhov is said to have greatly inspired Carver in his poetry to which he devoted much of his later years. We’ll also read and discuss several of his final poems alongside his stories.

 November 5

In Beautiful Boy (2008), David Sheff presents a grinding account of his son Nic’s descent into drug addiction. The principal drug in Nic’s story is methamphetamine. Set in the affluent and liberal world of Marin County, the book offers a sustained narrative of a son and family in crisis, and at the heart of it are Sheff’s agony as a father and his attempts to understand, to intervene, and to achieve some kind of personal growth in the face of calamity. Sheff also explores many issues raised by addiction and meth—among them the question of the causative factors in Nic’s drug use, the moralistic versus the “disease model” for understanding the addict’s struggle, the nature and quality of existing medical treatment for users of meth, and the existential pain of experiencing one’s powerlessness to help those one loves and cares for most. Sheff’s book raises many urgent practical questions about the treatment of addiction, and it may offer insights into human relationships that extend beyond the boundaries of the specific and horribly painful story he has to tell.

 December 3

The official website as well as the back cover of J.R. Moehringer's landmark memoir, The Tender Bar, is headlined with a blurb by the late journalist and historian, David Halberstam: "A memoir about coming of age in, of all unlikely places, a great American bar. Blessedly, Moehringer's story is both joyous and triumphant." Moehringer is, himself, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and one can appreciate why he, his webmaster, and his publisher would highlight Halberstam's complimentary reaction to the book, which also happens to be a perfect capsule summary of it. The narrative is a conventional bildungsroman, and the setting is unusual but as quintessentially American as Huck Finn's raft floating down the Mississippi River. Finally, the outcome of Moehringer's journey from boyhood to manhood as well as the opportunity for the reader to ride alongside him is, indeed, a blessing.