PERRI KLASS is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University. She attended Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and her fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital. She has written extensively about medicine, children, literacy, and knitting. Her nonfiction includes Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen, which she coauthored with her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass, and Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn’t Fit In, which she coauthored with Eileen Costello. She is also the author of two collections and other works of fiction including the novels The Mystery of Breathing and Other Women’s Children. Her most recent books are Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor and The Mercy Rule. Her short stories have won five O. Henry awards, and in 2006 she was the recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Award. She is a longtime member of the executive board of PEN New England, which she chaired from 2004 to 2006.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON was born in New York City and graduated from New York Medical College in 1948. He completed his training in psychiatry at the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York. He was an air force psychiatrist serving in the United States, Japan, and Korea from 1951 to 1953. He was research associate in psychiatry at Harvard from 1956 to 1961. He is a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Hospital, a former distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center, and director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He is the author of many books including The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide; Death in Life: Survivors and Hiroshima; Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism; Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (with Greg Mitchell); and The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation.
JOHN MURRAY was born in Adelaide, South Australia, where he studied medicine. He has an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. In 1992, he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, specializing in epidemic dysentery and cholera in Africa and Asia. Since 1995, he has worked full-time on child health programs in developing countries, most recently in China and Ghana. He is the author of A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies.
DANIELLE OFRI is Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine, but her clinical home is at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States. She is cofounder and editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book, Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients, is about the experience of immigrants and Americans in the US health care system. She is the author of two collections of essays about life in medicine: Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine and Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue. She also edited The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Lancet, and on National Public Radio. Her essays have been selected for Best American Essays (twice) and Best American Science Writing. She is the recipient of the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.”
OLIVER SACKS was born in London, to a family of physicians and scientists. He studied at Oxford University and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lived and worked in New York since 1965. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and was also designated the university’s first Columbia University Artist. In 1966, he began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital; there he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, later to become the subjects of his well-known book Awakenings, which inspired a play by Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska) and the Oscar-nominated feature film Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks is also known for his collections The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with a range of often bizarre neurological conditions. He has written about the world of the deaf and sign language in Seeing Voices, and about a community of color-blind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has explored his experiences as a doctor in Migraine, and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, was published in 2001. His most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. His work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as in medical journals. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002, he was awarded Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities and colleges, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. Born of Indian parents, he grew up near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and began his medical training there. After moving to the US, he took time off from medicine to study writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1991. Since then, his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Granta, the Atlantic, Forbes.com, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. His first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of Aids, published in 1994, was one of five chosen as best books of the year by Time magazine, and later was made into a TV movie directed by Mira Nair. His second book, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner’s struggle with addiction, was a New York Times Notable Book. Cutting for Stone, his first novel, was published in 2009, and was a New York Times best seller.
GABRIEL WESTON was born in London. She earned an M.A. in English literature at Edinburgh University and studied medicine in London. She qualified as a doctor in 2000, and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. Her collection Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She works as a part-time ENT surgeon and is writing her second book. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
IRVIN YALOM was born in Washington, DC, and graduated from Boston University School of Medicine. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is the author of the classic textbooks The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Existential Psychotherapy, and Inpatient Group Psychotherapy, and coauthor of Every Day Gets a Little Closer, Encounter Groups: First Facts, and A Concise Guide to Group Psychotherapy. He has also written Love’s Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life (a collection of true and fictionalized tales of therapy), Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, and three novels, When Nietzsche Wept, Lying on the Couch, and The Schopenhauer Cure. The Yalom Reader is an anthology of his best-known works, and he has also written a collection of essays on writing. He is married and has four children.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. First and foremost, I am indebted to the incredible generosity of all the contributors to this anthology. I would also like to thank Peter Balakian, Peter Bishop, Lexy Bloom, Lan Samantha Chang, Evan Fa
llenberg, Deborah Harris, Robin Hemley, Carolyn Hessel, Antoni Jach, Edward Kastenmeier, Lee Kofman, Michael Kramer, Judy Labensohn, Bev Magennis, Nicola Redhouse, Henry Rosenbloom, Todd Shuster, Amanda Tokar, and Danny Yanez. Special thanks to Jacinta Dimase, Donna-Lee Frieze, Diana Hanaor, Deborah Leiser-Moore, and Sandra Levin.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following material:
“We Are Nighttime Travelers” from Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin, copyright © 1988 by Ethan Canin. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York.
“Resurrectionist” from Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Morality by Pauline W. Chen, copyright © 2007 by Pauline W. Chen. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
“Dog 1, Dog 2” by Nick Earls, copyright © 1993 by Nick Earls. First published in Queensland: Words and All by Outrider/Phoenix Publications, Brisbane. Reprinted by permission of Nick Earls.
“The Learning Curve” by Atul Gawande, copyright © 2002 by Atul Gawande. First published in The New Yorker, January 2002. Reprinted by permission of Atul Gawande.
“The Duty to Die Cheaply” from The List of All Answers: Collected Stories by Peter Goldsworthy, copyright © 2004 by Peter Goldsworthy. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (Australia), Camberwell.
“Finding Joshua” by Jacinta Halloran, copyright © 2005 by Jacinta Halloran. First published in Other Lives: Best of GP Fiction by Australian Doctor, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Australian Doctor.
“Falling Down” from Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar, copyright © 2008 by Sandeep Jauhar. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, New York.
“Tahirih” by Leah Kaminsky, copyright © 2009 by Leah Kaminsky. First published in Transnational Literature 2, Flinders University, Adelaide.
“Index Case” by Perri Klass, copyright © 2004 by Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. First published in The New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 350, 5/13/2004. Reprinted by permission of Massachusetts Medical Society.
“The Infernal Chorus” from Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir by Robert Jay Lifton, copyright © 2011 by Robert Jay Lifton. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York.
“Communion” by John Murray, copyright © 2010 by John Murray. Reprinted by permission of John Murray.
“Intensive Care” from Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue by Danielle Ofri, copyright © 2003 by Danielle Ofri. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
“The Lost Mariner” from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks, copyright © 1970, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985 by Oliver Sacks. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, and Pan MacMillan, London.
“Bedside Manners” by Abraham Verghese, copyright © 2007 by Abraham Verghese. First published in Texas Monthly, 2007. Reprinted by permission of Texas Monthly and Abraham Verghese.
“Beauty” from Direct Red by Gabriel Weston, copyright © 2009 by Gabriel Weston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, New York; Jonathan Cape, a division of The Random House Group Ltd., London; and Doubleday Canada, Toronto.
“Do Not Go Gentle” from Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, copyright © 1989 by Irvin D. Yalom. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York, and Penguin Books Ltd., London.
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