Medicine https://www.thesunmagazine.org/rss en-us Standards of Care The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28985 Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/606-standards-of-care 606-4-wild-preview.jpg 606 - Wild - Pitts The Feeding Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28988 Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/606-the-feeding 606-26-rios-preview.jpg 606 - Rios - Glatt Our Fraying Hearts I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28986 Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/606-our-fraying-hearts 606-10-taher-preview.jpg 606 - Taher - Reinbold Sunbeams

God and the Doctor we alike adore / But only when in danger, not before; / The danger o’er, both are alike requited, / God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.

John Owen

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28984 Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/606-sunbeams 606-49-wild-preview.jpg 606 - Wild - Sunbeams Milk Pumped for an infant, spilled at the dinner table, used as a tear gas antidote

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28993 Sun, 31 May 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/606-milk 606-30-wild-preview.jpg 606 - Wild - Milk My Bowstring Heart On the field I was all animal instinct and brute force—a bruiser, a bone breaker. Every tackle was a rebuke against a life where fathers die. When I played rugby, I wasn’t a broke, lost little girl. I wasn’t a struggling amateur writer. I had goals. I was a winner. I was MVP. I was someone.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28969 Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/605-my-bowstring-heart 605-38-yeomans-preview.jpg 605 - Yeomans - Whitmore Home Invasions Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.”

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28968 Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/605-home-invasions 605-24-mcmanis-preview.jpg 605 - McMains - Myka The Night I Don't Remember It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28941 Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/603-the-night-i-dont-remember 603-27-kim-preview.jpg 603 - Kim - Ruddick Expats Rhonda tended to take in people—and cats, Jessica said. Spending about $150 of her monthly Social Security check on cat food, in addition to supporting her meth habit, had left her broke most of the time.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28939 Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/603-expats 603-40-carlsonwee-preview.jpg 603 - CarlsonWee - Garcia The Children's Wing Other parents see our little girl running up and down the hall, or performing a dance in the playroom, or climbing onto a stool to get the Funny Bunny game from the closet, and they ask why we are here. I have told the story so many times to so many different doctors that I’m beginning to wonder if I’m keeping the details straight. Was it four in the morning or six? What woke us—the trembling and shaking, or the lack of breathing, or the choking sounds?

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28884 Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/600-the-childrens-wing 600-43-saman-preview.jpg 600-Saman-Bashaw Avium You don’t know what’s with Marjorie, // but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure / worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs / in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings, // you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet / it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly / to be believed. . .

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28832 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/avium-kathryn-jordan-poem-597 Airborne Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28824 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/seema-lakdawala-airborne-viruses-spread-pandemic-597 597-4-weil-preview.jpg 597 - Weil - Leviton Angel’s Breath Angel’s hooves stay planted, but I feel the question in his back, the offer to spin and gallop. I hold firm in my seat, knees forward, signaling to my horse that we should not move. He trusts me and squares his stance.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22390 Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:05:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22390-angel-s-breath Dad Calls To Tell Me michaelmark3@gmail.com he used the Amazonian jujitsu death / grip to choke out the pharmacist / who wouldn’t give him his heart medication / until tomorrow — which, he admits, is when / it’s actually scheduled for pickup.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25676 Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25676-dad-calls-to-tell-me Every Baby Needs To Be Rocked I want to help carry the burden when it is heaviest. The dying patients and their families need time with a compassionate stranger: someone they don’t have to expend their fragile energy to try to support or protect.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27929 Sat, 30 Apr 2022 04:10:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27929-every-baby-needs-to-be-rocked Parting The Clouds All the data so far suggest that a single treatment, or two treatments, with psychedelics can relieve depression for an extended period, because the psychedelics cause the patient to see the world differently.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27294 Tue, 19 Jan 2021 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27294-parting-the-clouds Pills One pill / two pills / red pills / blue pills

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27199 Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27199-pills The Button The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25016 Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:05:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25016-the-button Stage Four Now I believe in everything. / Aromatherapy: peppermint and sandalwood / and lavender and especially frankincense, / because, you know, the Three Wise Men. / Mindful breathing, I believe in that, too.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25839 Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25839-stage-four Sunbeams

So many come to the sickroom thinking of themselves as men of science fighting disease and not as healers with a little knowledge helping nature to get a sick man well.

Auckland Geddes

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22270 Tue, 22 Mar 2016 13:58:53 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22270-sunbeams Twenty-Three Weeks Dr. C. doesn’t sit, as if he won’t be staying long, but he does have information for us. He says that 75 percent of women deliver within a week of membrane rupture. He says that if they induce labor now, and Olivia is alive, we will have complete say in her care and how much we want the doctors to do to keep her alive. But if I deliver a few days from now, my daughter will be twenty-four weeks, and the hospital’s ethics board will step in to limit our choices.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24677 Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:27:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24677-twenty-three-weeks <em>excerpted from</em><br />The Surgeon As Priest I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate, his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious — not of him, not of Yeshi Dhonden for his gift of beauty and holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that, touched so, received. And I know that I, who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23885 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 17:08:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/selzer-excerpt-the-surgeon-as-priest Losing John Though we aren’t blasé about death, we are accustomed to it. We know it will happen. When a person is hospitalized, it means his or her condition could turn serious, fast. A simple case of pneumonia could result in a whole-body infection that spirals and becomes fatal. A patient receiving a new hip could develop a blood clot that clogs his lungs. A heart-failure patient could suffer an arrhythmia. But hospital deaths are rarely as terrible as John’s.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22912 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 17:03:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22912-losing-john Bugs All day I fought the HIV virus, a bug that was taking men — or mostly men — from the world, and at night I found light-brown, circular bugs on my pillow. I never crushed them; I lifted them delicately into a trash bin.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26316 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 17:02:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26316-bugs This Will Sting And Burn It is time for him to mark the spot that he will cut out. I turn around in the chair, and the starched edge of his white coat brushes my naked shoulder as he moves behind me. I can smell the magic marker and feel the cold circle he draws on my back. He asks if anybody is here with me, and I say no. I know what he’s thinking: that he won’t have to come out and talk to the relatives in the waiting room after the surgery is over.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24017 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 17:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24017-this-will-sting-and-burn The Miracle In Front Of You You have to notice beauty when it appears. That means you have to show up and shut up. If I could give just one piece of advice to all medical students, I would say, “Show up completely, and then shut up for at least two minutes while the miracle in front of you tells you who they are and how you can help them.” If every doctor did just that one thing, it would change medicine.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23260 Fri, 01 Jan 2016 16:58:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23260-the-miracle-in-front-of-you As We Lay Dying At every deathbed and hospital room, I didn’t see sane dying. I saw sedated dying, depressed dying, isolated dying, utterly disembodied dying. Sane dying would require a childhood steeped in death’s presence, an adulthood employed in its service, and an elderhood testifying to its necessity. Sane dying is a village-making event: lots of people with plenty to do, the whole production endorsing life.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25511 Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25511-as-we-lay-dying Almost Unendurable Beauty The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21319 Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21319-almost-unendurable-beauty The Good Patient I placed a check mark next to the box on the insurance form that said “pre-existing condition.” I placed a check mark next to “nonsmoker.” I placed a check mark next to dog owner, homeowner, married, employed, college educated, drinks socially, and has no savings or family members with money to turn to for help. I placed a check mark next to I want to live to be twenty-six.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23786 Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23786-the-good-patient Living Medicine When you use a living medicine and get well, you feel that the world is alive and aware and wants to help you. People often talk about saving the Earth, but how many times have you experienced the Earth saving you?

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24688 Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24688-living-medicine