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Healthcare
Homeless, But Not Crazy
Shortly after 1 a.m. recently, on-call in the psychiatric emergency room of a Boston hospital, I was asked to evaluate a homeless man, and in the process I confronted the limits of my professional empathy.
March 1993Meet Mr. Fist
Random violence, as I practice it, is a delicate task. You want to injure the punchee just enough to make him or her think, without causing any major damage.
October 1992Delicate Business
One of my patients recently informed me that she had decided to charge for sex. After many affairs with men who had proven untrustworthy, she was abandoning her search for a genuine relationship.
August 1992The Doctor
On Friday evening, December 31, 1982, corresponding to 15 Teveth, 5743, Hyman Lebele Andower rose from his evening meal, sat on the couch to read his evening paper, and felt a sharp, twisting pain in his genitals.
October 1991The Attending Physician
These days, the label “attending” is attached to “physician” as a matter of course, obscuring the possibility that it might once have meant something beyond a job description.
September 1991Abortion
Secret codes, an underground network of doctors, complications
September 1991Without Cost Or Obligation
We went past the Allied checkpoint, past the American, the Brit, and the Frenchman, past the sign in more languages than we could read — YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.
September 1990From A Distance, Paradise
The children grew rapidly after birth, until they were weaned from the breast, and then never grew again. We never saw any cases of diaper rash because nobody could afford diapers. I had never before thought of diaper rash as a disease of affluence.
March 1988Harvest Moon
Portrait Of A Nursing Home
We all die, and most of us grow old, and for a certain inevitable number of us age brings its sisters: dependence, frailty, and a gut-wrenching perishability. Age is the last place and time most of us will inhabit, and the fact that age seems so foreign to most of us, as though cleft from the known world, is one of life’s sly tricks.
September 1987
