SPOTLIGHT -
July 26th 2024
"My own dear love, he is all my world,—And I wish I’d never met him."
July 25th 2024
Explore a poem about death, grief, and the healing powers of the humanities.
July 19th 2024
"I was talking on the phone, walking steadier, noticed the tap, and after, the tap-step, a light knock, a knock like someone’s at the door come to visit..."
July 12th 2024
"...the beauty still intoxicating, the spirit of the research like a child swimming for the first time in the sea, awed..."
July 11th 2024
"By now I’ve lost track of time with this boy who reminds me of myself when I imagined becoming a doctor..."
The Tarts
I wanted this to be like a fairy tale walk in the woods before kids, careers, blood clots and bone mets...
Birthday Party
Green hills patched with April, snow and I’ve chosen to celebrate. with a full slate of patients.
The Juggler
After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.
Psychiatry Comic: Anger Management Clinic
When's your teed off time?
We Wrote
We wrote through the night, between moonlight and morning, admissions and discharges, wrote when phones stopped ringing, when pagers stopped paging. We were raw, opening ourselves to chaos and mystery...
Prior Auths
Funny how fast we become prisoners with lost convictions as we fill out the forms, patients getting sicker while they wait.
Wound Healing
My doctor-wife squeezes her needle-nose tweezers and lifts the tiny knots high enough to snip with surgical scissors...
Psychiatry Comic: Holiday Hugs
Please! No more group hugs!
Boogie Child
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...
The Pledge
There was combat in Nam and I let my hair grow long, went to college, studied orgo until I became draft exempt...
Musician Injuries
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...
Housestaff Haiku
Monday, July 1st...Twenty-two new residents...All with perfect teeth...
Surf Story
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...
Psychiatry Comic: Pathological Resignation
Sometimes it just doesn't pay to fight.
Creativity and Bipolar Disorder: A Fresh Look
People with mood disorders (and those who care about them) are likely to experience a healing reconsideration of their own experiences as they read this book.
Numbers Game
Med school finals, ten backpack pounds of biochem hauled for months, my epiphany: I would never know more about glucose metabolism than that morning...
Psychiatry Comic: Mrs. Freud
Poor Sigmund. Mrs. Freud gave him the slip.
Taking the Pulse
Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down. Always sit down. Then ask for permission...
The Arts and Humanities in Psychiatry . . . A Debut
Creativity should not be seen as “optional” in psychiatry. Rather, it helps us to approach clinical problems in new ways.
Psychiatry Comic: Have a Heart
"If I only had a heart."
Lung Cancer in Reverse Times-Lapse Photography
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...
The Intern’s Spot
We teach every intern how to find the place where they can lay down a silver stethoscope and listen to everything...
Professionalism Defined
After your exams, after your diploma, after all the nights on call, missed dinners and diagnoses, after your apologies...
The Ladder
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...
The Yellow Pages
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...
Psychiatry Comic: Ruffled Feathers
Almost everyone can benefit from psychotherapy at some point in their lives.
Letter From Luke
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...
End of the Season
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.
Psychiatry Comic: Save the What?
Is the hippo [campus] an endangered species?
At the Monhegan Island General Store
I’m happy to be off the trail, out of the wind and salt spray, safe from the fog’s cold claw...