Browse Topics

Delicate 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.

Doing Good

A foot massage, two demonic brothers, a thief

The 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.

Abortion

Secret codes, an underground network of doctors, complications

The 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.

Without 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.

From 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.

Harvest 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.

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.

Why 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.