Richard M. Berlin, MD

My doctor-wife squeezes her needle-nose tweezers and lifts the tiny knots high enough to snip with surgical scissors...

Our time was Thursday, 5 o’clock, my psychiatrist’s door always opened wide, him wearing a wool sweater, sipping tea, lights dimmed to an endless twilight...

There was combat in Nam and I let my hair grow long, went to college, studied orgo until I became draft exempt...

County hospital GYN clinic back in the days of Power to the People, five hours for 50 women stirruped by our clinic nurse...

When the soloist lowers her Strad and takes a bow, she reveals the violin’s mark on her throat, which makes me think of Mozart...

Monday, July 1st...Twenty-two new residents...All with perfect teeth...

I was surfing a long board out past the place where you can still smell Coppertone when a ten foot wave smashed me down into darkness...

Med school finals, ten backpack pounds of biochem hauled for months, my epiphany: I would never know more about glucose metabolism than that morning...

Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down. Always sit down. Then ask for permission...

At three breaths before death a blue latex hand pulls out a trach tube, a blade skims over the zipped up hole, and droplets of blood are sucked into skin...

We teach every intern how to find the place where they can lay down a silver stethoscope and listen to everything...

After your exams, after your diploma, after all the nights on call, missed dinners and diagnoses, after your apologies...

Bolted to the bedroom loft, twenty feet high with lacquered sides and honey colored risers polished with pine-scented wax-these are the rungs I climb to the feather bed, candle, and bottle of red wine...

Sleepless in New Haven, I read this hotel room’s only other book. Power-suited lawyers on the back cover advertise to sue for antidepressant suicides if families will call 1-800-BAD-MEDS...

He wrote that he didn’t know what to say to comfort us, so he decided to describe the view from his rented room near Sydney...

Here we present an excerpt from a screenplay to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.

Half price T-shirts and ice cream cones, no more tomatoes or New York Times, people out patching the roof, putting up storms, the last guests gone tomorrow.

I’m happy to be off the trail, out of the wind and salt spray, safe from the fog’s cold claw...

Dead into a wall of wind, they cliff jump with parabolic wings curled over pilots cradled in goose down and canvas.

I’m glad we’re studying this one, a lusty, almost immortal guy living in his dark tunnels of love.

He didn’t notice snow falling in the Krankenhaus courtyard the night he fell in love. A mere intern, castrated by Jew-hating med school professors...

I drive west along the black granite bed of Cold River as it sweeps down the mountain. My best friend drives the same road east, the lies his wife told the judge trailing us...

Laennec was running late when he saw children send sounds through a wooden beam...

When a health system honcho asks me to see his thirty-year-old son “for a little anxiety” I can only agree. He arrives with a girlfriend, the couple dressed like characters from an Armani ad...

Tears track his leathered face like seawater spilled from a sinking hull...

My penmanship sucks. So does my typing. I’ve been this way since seventh grade...

Looking out at a flat gray sea, I try to imagine the chasms in the ocean’s floor where lava laced with strontium pours...

I want my patients to believe I consider Peabody’s advice before I see them, that I recognize our shared humanity...

He smoked trabucos, mild miniatures produced by the Austrian monopoly, but preferred Don Pedros and Reina Cubanos...

The trouble with looking like a God becomes clear after we learn to wear our mask of omnipotence, pretending to know the answers to questions...