Mummies Meet the Twenty-First Century

By the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE), tomb robbers had already been operating for many years. Priests moved royal mummies from their tombs and reburied them in caches, often without their funeral goods. How do we find the identities of these mummies, uncovered in the 1900’s and distributed to museums across the globe? In Scanning the Pharaohs—CT Imaging of the New Kingdom Royal Mummies , Zahi Hawass and Sahar N. Saleem use high-definition CT scanning and DNA analysis  to answer this question.

This book is full of mystery. Which mummy is Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled Egypt like a man?  How can we identify King Tut’s parents and grandparents? Who died young? Who lived for 92 years? Who was murdered?

I would subtitle this book as “All you ever wanted to know about mummies.” There are in-depth explanations of the process of mummification, stories of tombs great and small, and anecdotes about archaeologists and tomb robbers. The most enjoyable parts of the books are called Sidelights, which give us special looks at individual Pharaohs the history of their reigns. The photographs are breathtaking, and the X-ray and CT images, particularly the 3-D reconstructions, are amazing.

The science is explained at several levels, appealing to both medical and non-medical readers. The Egyptology is flawless.  There are discussions of genetics, injury, and disease, war and peace, jealousy and familial love—all the components of a richly vibrant civilization of the past.

As a child, I often curled up with books of Egyptology, finding them endlessly fascinating.  The adult me loves this book just as much.

MAUREEN HIRTHLER is a physician and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her work has appeared in several journals, most recently in the Yale Journal of Medical Humanities, Hospital Drive, and Hippocampus, and is forthcoming in Touch and the Mulberry Fork Review. Her piece, “D/D” appeared in the Fall 2014 Intima.

Poetry In Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness and Healing. Edited by Michael Salcman

For more information about Poetry in Medicine by Michael Salcman, go to http://www.perseabooks.com/detail.php?bookID=115

If the doctors cure

then the sun sees it.

If the doctors kill,

then the earth hides it.

—from "Doctors" by Anne Sexton

Most of us would not be surprised to learn Anne Sexton had written a poem entitled "Doctors." The confessional poet, who was raised in Weston, MA., was institutionalized throughout her life and often under medical care for depression. But many of us in the medical humanities might be stunned at just how many poets have addressed issues in medicine, as we discover in Poetry In Medicine, an in-depth, beautifully-conceived collection edited by poet and neurosurgeon Michael Salcman.

What makes this collection a pleasure to read—either from the inspiring foreward by poet Michael Collier to the index of poets at the end, or by dipping in and out of its treasures in a random fashion—is that Dr. Salcman has organized it in the most ingenious ways: There are chapters entitled, "The Wisdom of the Body: Anatomy & Physiology," "Contagions, Infections & Fevers," "From The Children's Ward," and "Looking Inside: Procedures, Surgical & Diagnostic." There are also simpler categories, like "Patients" and "Doctors and Other Healers." Work by Shakespeare, Ovid, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ogden Nash, W.B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, e.e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop and dozens more populate the pages. Each of these writers have written poems that celebrate, anoint, critique, embrace, love or hate doctors, illness, suffering, medicine and healthcare.

Michael Salcman, photo graphed here at a reading in November 2015 at the Columbia University Medical Center to celebrate the literary & fine arts journal, Reflexions, is a poet, neurosurgeon, and art historian, formerly chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is the author of six medical textbooks and six collections of verse, including The Clock Made of Confetti and The Enemy of Good Is Better.  Dr. Salcman reads the poem, "The Clock Made of Confetti" below.

There is Thomas Hardy's "A Wasted Illness," Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser" and C. P. Cavafy's "The Bandaged Shoulder" alongside Kate Kimball's "Transfusion" and my particular favorite, "Night Thoughts Over A Sick Child," by Philip Levine, which brought back memories of caring for my feverish son on a long, lonely midnight vigil. We are given topics as specific as "Colonoscopy Sonnet" by Sandra M. Gilbert about a medical procedure being done on the leader of the free world ("On the news tonight, a presidential/colonoscopy...") to more philosophical musings about death from Yeats in "A Friend's Illness":

Sickness brought me this

Thought, in that scale of his:

Why should I be dismayed

Though flame had burned the whole

World, as it were a coal,

Now I have seen it weighed

Against a soul?

Poetry in Medicine achieves many things, the primary one being a pleasurable read for anyone interested in literature. What seems additionally relevant for those involved in healthcare or teaching Narrative Medicine is the tremendous cache of writing Dr. Salcman has amassed that provides us with rich material— for study, for inspiration and for reflection and response.—Donna Bulseco

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Scars: An Anthology. Edited by Erin Wood

For more on this book, go to www.etaliapress.com

For some two years, Erin Wood spent her time examining scars. As careful and probing as a surgeon, the writer and editor of Scars: An Anthology examined a wealth of poems, photographs, and prose about the subject and handled each person's revealing narrative with the emerging understanding that "there is a great deal about our scars that extends far beyond the individual body and the self."

Wood, whose essay "We Scar, We Heal, We Rise" was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2013 (it appears in this volume) reflects on the ways scars may "belong to different versions of ourselves: our past selves...or new selves, selves in transition, or even selves we wish to regard more fully."

Stories that address these issues make the collection a rich reading experience that at times can be intense and painful, but also enlightening and entertaining. There is a lot of humor alongside the humanity that's revealed, as well as insight into the clinical encounter, most notably in Sayantani DasGupta's "'Tell Me About Your Scar': Narrative Medicine and The Scars of Intelligibility." One of the most moving and insightful pieces in the collection is "The Women's Table," an interview with Andrea Zekis, who speaks frankly about her "gender confirmation surgery" and the scars, emotional and physical, created but also taken away during her transition. A photo essay by New York photographer David Jay, who began The SCAR Project, is a stunning look at those who show their scars frankly and with pride. And while many of the pieces in this book are personal essays and memoirs, it is the poetry— like Samantha Plakun's "Written In Stitches" and Philip Martin's "The Pry Bar"—that draws the reader in close to examine the beauty and personal history revealed in the body's terrain.—Donna Bulseco

On December 10,2015, Columbia University's Seminar on Narrative, Health and Social Justice presented "Scars as Art, Text and Experience" at the Faculty House, featuring Editor Erin Wood and contributors Kelli Dunham, Lorrie Fredette, Samantha Plakun, and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes. Marsha Hurst, who is a lecturer in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and co-chairs the University Seminar on "Narrative, Health, and Social Justice" introduced the panel. Hurst is co-editor with Sayantani DasGupta of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. Listen to the event in its entirety below:

Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey by Bud Shaw, M.D.

There’s a revelation that comes about halfway through Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon’s Odyssey by Bud Shaw, M.D. The title leads you to believe you’ll be reading a medical memoir, a genre that has drawn a lot of attention recently with fine books by Henry Marsh (Do No Harm) and Atul Gawande (Being Mortal). Dr. Shaw’s new book traces his evolution from an impressionable 31-year-old surgical resident in Utah through his years of training in what was then the relatively new field of liver transplantation, as well as other significant life events—marrying, divorcing, being fired, undergoing treatment for lymphoma, and getting older and shifting into a new life as a writer. Along the way, we meet the kind of characters you might encounter in a novel: Renowned transplant surgeon Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, one of the most ornery, foul-mouthed, caustic human beings you’d never want to entrust your life to—except for the fact that he was brilliant, fearless and demanded the best out of his team: the taciturn and efficient Dr. Shun Iwatsuki, Dr. Hong from Shanghai (dubbed the Human Retractor for his skill at retracting a patient’s rib cage out of Dr. Starzl’s way), Dr. Carlos Fernandez-Bueno, and Shaw. We meet many patients, in chapters with titles like “Janie and the Giant Abscess,” “Death 5, Mrs. Rothstein l” and “Burned Yolanda.” Shaw’s father, also a doctor, is a major presence, and the emotional thru-line of a father-son relationship complicated by a shared vocation is finely drawn.

Author Bud Shaw, M.D. The father of three adult children, Shaw lives with his wife, novelist Rebecca Rotert (Shaw), in the wooded hills north of Omaha, Nebraska.

Check back in January for an interview with Dr. Shaw on Intima.

So here is the revelation: Medical humanities has found its Raymond Carver. Dr. Shaw’s writing is a true departure from the other brilliant books in this genre because of the distinctive way he tells his stories. His writing is taut, spare and direct, but also gracefully nuanced. We feel we’re getting a factual accounting of events, but also the bigger, more symbolic picture of a time and place and the lives within it. There is a visceral recognition of the physical and psychological toll exacted on physicians and the real fears associated with a job that deals with life and death on a daily basis. Yet, thankfully, the writing never succumbs to sentimentality or philosophizing. Like Carver, Dr. Shaw lays out the Big Issues by making the little worlds we live in alive and real on the page.

Here’s how the chapter “Good Opera” begins:

On the table lay a man from Kansas. He had a wife, two daughters under five, and a bad liver. He had a belly full of fluid, skin glowing like a pumpkin, and a nest of veins like snakes between my knife and his liver.

I looked into the eyes of four surgeons scrubbed and waiting to help me. Shun was in the lounge smoking. He’d helped me do dozens of transplants by then and he figured I’d call for him if I got into trouble. Hong, the Human Retractor, grinned at me. I asked for the knife and we began.

As with any medical memoir, expect a few squeamish moments (that is, if you’re not a clinician used to talk about fluids, blood, diseases, etc.). Expect, also, to be moved by a doctor’s tales, expressed succinctly and with great depth and feeling.—Donna Bulseco

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DONNA BULSECO, M.A., M.S., is a graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University and Managing Editor of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. After doing undergraduate work at UCLA in creative writing and American poetry, the L.A. native studied American Gothic and English at Brown University, then moved to New York City in the late seventies. She has been an editor and journalist for the past 25 years at publications such as Women's Wear Daily, W, Self, and InStyle, and has written articles for Health, More, Redbook, and the New York Times.  

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown, RN

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The Shift follows Theresa Brown through a twelve hour shift at the urban teaching hospital where she works as a registered nurse.  Brown’s thoughtful and insightful observations provide an inside look at the challenges of nursing on an oncology unit, as she takes care of patients like frail Mr. Hampton, whose cutting-edge treatment may kill him, and anxious Candace, awaiting a stem cell transplant. 

This nonfiction narrative goes into great depth and detail about hospital routine and the stress it puts on patients, nurses and doctors.  The book is also, surprisingly, filled with literary references, from writers as varied as William Blake, Abraham Verghese, and Rudyard Kipling.  Brown, a former English professor who writes an occasional column on nursing issues for The New York Times, deftly inserts these to lend meaning to certain poignant moments, such as when she likens William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” to a favorite patient’s candy dish, each capable of teaching us something about what is important in life.

The pace of the book allows for these detours, as well as detours into some of Brown’s memories, worries and fears.  But what comes through most clearly are the empathy and compassion she feels for her patients, as she searches for an understanding of the meaning of health, illness and caring.  Brown laments the way things used to be, while simultaneously accepting how much they have changed.  A cancer diagnosis is no longer the death sentence it once was for the patients we encounter in The Shift, yet Brown must still help patients face the end of their lives, her most challenging yet ultimately most rewarding task. 

To Brown, nursing is like “putting your shoulder to a rock and pushing it uphill.”  Throughout the book she keeps the reader turning the pages with the possibility that at any time the rock might slip and roll back down the hill.  During this twelve hour shift, it never does. —Priscilla Mainardi

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Priscilla Mainardi is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University where she received a MFA in creative writing in 2012 while continuing to practice as a registered nurse.  Often awed by her patients’ ability to cope with dire health issues, she is interested in exploring the ways in which narrative can connect caregivers and patients in a stronger bond to foster healing, and in the contributions of nurses to the field of narrative medicine. Her short story, "Pretending Not to Know," appeared in the Spring 2014 Intima. Mainardi joined the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine in Fall 2015.