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Healthcare
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Inside The Modern Hospital
Every little odd ache, cramp, tension; each sore throat, swollen gland, headache; a sudden pain when you reach for something on a shelf, a morning lethargy, an unexpected reluctance: all these whisper cancer.
March 1986Why I Like Dead People
I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.
November 1985Emergency
It is, in a phrase aptly supplied by a nurse, like five hundred hells. Apparently the whole town has converged upon the hospital, all migrating to the Emergency Rooms.
July 1985Cancer Is The Answer
Cancer, which had begun to affect as many as one in four, was a disease whereby an essentially weak, immature, dysfunctional cell invaded and occupied surrounding territories, dislocating the inhabitants, destroying the territory, devouring the resources, providing no exchange whatsoever until the entire territory was devastated and the inhabitants died of starvation, suffocation or toxicity. This dread disease became endemic to the second half of the twentieth century as tuberculosis had been in Europe in the nineteenth, and the plague earlier. Ironically, cancer, which perfectly mirrored imperialism, became through its proliferation the agency of spiritual and social — and therefore political — conversion.
January 1985Cold Steel
She could have been cast as a nun in an old Bing Crosby movie, the one who trailed the heroine and only came in on the chorus. Charlotte was a person who seemed to have no childhood, whom you could not imagine as younger than she was at the moment you met her.
August 1984The Doctor Who Won’t Charge
An Interview With Patch Adams
People are not their diseases. They are the same weak fragile beings that we ourselves are. Traditionally, a physician in general practice follows patients throughout their lives, but without touching on the quality of a person’s life, their loves, concerns, and fears, we ignore a gigantic area of resource and of disease.
August 1984Descent Into Brotherland
Now I’ve visited okie in the brig before, I’ve visited okie in the psychiatric wards, and I’ve visited okie in the oklahoma jail, and I’ve talked to the lawyers and jail wardens and policemen and psychiatric boards and judges. So I’m only a little bit nervous about talking to this va psychiatrist about okie’s va check which hasn’t been coming for the right amount of disability since he got out of jail.
June 1984Gently Changing
An Interview On Cancer And Health With O. Carl Simonton
What we have our patients do is to take the symptoms of cancer as the illness, and to look for the five biggest changes that they can identify in their lives in the 18 months prior to the diagnosis being made. If they have had subsequent flareups, they look at the six months prior to each flareup. Then, they look at their emotional reactions to those changes. Finally, with each episode, they look at five good things that happened to them as a result of the diagnosis or of each flareup — what they get out of being sick.
November 1982
