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Medicine

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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.

By JoDean Nicolette November 2022
Poetry

Dad Calls To Tell Me

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.

By Michael Mark November 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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.

By Barbara Woodmansee April 2022
The Sun Interview

Parting The Clouds

Charles Raison On New Treatments For Depression

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.

By Sarah Conover January 2021
Poetry

Pills

One pill / two pills / red pills / blue pills

By Lesléa Newman November 2019
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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.

By Makana Eyre October 2019
Poetry

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.

By Mick Cochrane December 2017
Quotations

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

March 2016
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

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.

By Genevieve Thurtle February 2016
The Dog-Eared Page

excerpted from
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.

By Richard Selzer January 2016