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West Side Story
Image: Design of Signage I like my psychiatrist, but I often find that occupying fifty minutes with an account of my tedious life feels like a high price to pay for responsible prescription. “Do you...
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Terra Incognita
Remembering Sherwin Nuland, the author of How We Die, who died last week. Photo: Yale.edu I attended the Yale School of Medicine when Shep Nuland taught there, and despite our both being surgeons, I...
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Medical Expert Evidence
It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription:...
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Avoid Cholera with a Healthy Beard, and Other News
A twenty-three-year-old Viennese woman, drawn before and after contracting cholera in 1831. Image via Wired.com Say Jesus Christ dictates a book to you in a dream—who holds the copyright? Is it you or...
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Bus Pass
I was anxious about the doctor’s appointment. Not because I thought there was anything much wrong with me, but because I knew they’d want to do “blood work” as part of the “workup,” and that the...
View ArticleWriting Is a Nefarious Business
“Have you been doing anything you shouldn’t, William Carlos Williams?” asks the venerable women’s-hour host Mary McBride. “Writing for forty years!” replies the poet with alarming jocularity. “That’s a...
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An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
How Mary Toft convinced doctors she’d given birth to rabbit parts.Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.News travels fast in...
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Fucking with the Feds, and Other News
James Baldwin with Charlton Heston, left, and Marlon Brando, 1963.If you’re a best-selling author, here is a great way to piss off the FBI: announce that you’re writing a book about the FBI. In 1964,...
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First Breakfast at Home Following an Emergency Appendectomy
Judy Longley’s poem “First Breakfast at Home Following an Emergency Appendectomy” appeared in our Summer 1998 issue. Her collection My Journey Toward You was the 1993 winner of the Marianne Moore Prize...
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Night Doctors
Nineteenth-century medical schools plundered the graves of African Americans.“I remember a colored lady was going to work early in the morning, about half past five o’clock. She was standing at Twelfth...
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Autumn Hours, Part 6
Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Vanessa Davis is the author of the collections Spaniel Rage and Make Me a Woman. She is one of the Daily’s...
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Digital Obsolescence Is Such a Drag, and Other News
Miltos Manetas, Jesus Swimming, 2001. Image via the New York Times.The history of books bound in human skin is tied, as so many terrifying things are, to the history of medicine. As Megan Rosenbloom...
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That’s One Uncomfortable Switch-Hitter, and Other News
A Topps trading card from the sixties. Pity the switch-hitter, baseball’s ambidextrous magician, for he is divided against himself. Sure, he can hit right-handed, he can hit left-handed—he seems, on...
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The Art of the Lobotomy, and Other News
Yikes. Happy National Lobotomy Day! Take a moment to reflect on the pioneers of this innovative, deeply disturbing procedure, which proudly lives on in our nightmares, where it continues to stain the...
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Survivor
A hypochondriac’s guide to rare diseases. I recently made a wrong turn out of the parking lot of the Danbury Fair Mall, where I’d indulged in a bag of Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets and a pair of...
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Tchaikovsky’s Cure for All That Ails (the Stomach)
Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov, Pjotr I. Tschaikowski (detail), 1893, oil on canvas. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, at age fifty-three, after having been discovered by his younger...
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An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
How Mary Toft convinced doctors she’d given birth to rabbit parts. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. News travels fast in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fucking with the Feds, and Other News
James Baldwin with Charlton Heston, left, and Marlon Brando, 1963. If you’re a best-selling author, here is a great way to piss off the FBI: announce that you’re writing a book about the FBI. In 1964,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
First Breakfast at Home Following an Emergency Appendectomy
Judy Longley’s poem “First Breakfast at Home Following an Emergency Appendectomy” appeared in our Summer 1998 issue. Her collection My Journey Toward You was the 1993 winner of the Marianne Moore...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Night Doctors
Nineteenth-century medical schools plundered the graves of African Americans. “I remember a colored lady was going to work early in the morning, about half past five o’clock. She was standing at...
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