Jan 01, 2019 These medical memoirs often explore the personal and professional difficulties that physicians face through their calling. Here are five medical memoirs written by doctors that physician-hopefuls. May 08, 2019 Mental health memoirs offer an eye-opening look at the lives of the mentally ill and those around them. These works of narrative medicine allow others with similar challenges to say, “That’s exactly how I feel,” a powerful connection through representation when these conditions can be so isolating. This medical memoir is all about cancer, and in particular, how we have lost the war against it. In this book, Raza attacks the concept from every different angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. She even talks about the unbearable role of being her.

1. Medical Memoirs Blog
2. List Of Memoir Books

I’m off to The Healing Art of Writing Workshop at Dominican University in San Rafael, California, a city in Marin County just north of San Francisco. I am hoping to make some strong connections with other writers and healers, affirm my dedication to writing, revel in the company of writers and artists who are devoted to or interested in the field of medical humanities, and learn new techniques and strategies for expressing oneself with clarity and power.

For the first time, I have submitted writing to the workshop that does not have to do with my memoir manuscript about infant surgery, The Autobiography of a Sea Creature. I wrote a brand new piece to share titled “My Mother’s Ears” about my mother’s hearing loss and the effect it had on me growing up. My mother’s hearing was damaged after undergoing a surgery at age twenty-five in which she had chosen to try an experimental anesthetic rather than suffer the debilitating effects of ether.

Posts about Medical Memoirs written by Rosalind Reisner. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has received lots of wonderful press and will probably appear on many “best” lists at the end of the year. There’s a good reason: it’s quite special; an engaging human interest story that combines personal history and medical history. In the decades since then, medical memoir has developed into a popular subgenre, but its terms of engagement, so to speak, have radically changed. Nowadays, stories about specific patients (and also colleagues) are frequently an integral part of medical memoirs. And why not, one might ask.

I had heard many times about how her hearing loss occurred, how the resulting tinnitus affected her, and how my mother attempted to rectify the problem early on. Tinnitus, according to Merriam-Websteronline, is “a sensation of noise (as a ringing or roaring) that is caused by a bodily condition (as a disturbance of the auditory nerve or wax in the ear) and typically is of the subjective form which can only be heard by the one affected.” The condition sounds rather benign in this definition but the ringing in my mother’s ears was so severe that she could not hear the outside world without hearing aids.

Growing up, my mother told the story of her hearing loss over and over in the same way each time. Similarly, she had a particular way of telling and retelling my pyloric stenosis story–the same time-worn phrases again and again. Repeating a story of trauma is one of the clues in identifying a person who may be suffering from PTSD. When we hear ourselves and/or others telling a story over and over in the same tone and with the same words, something is stuck or frozen. The person needs a little kickstart to begin the journey of healing from whatever wounded him or her.

I am only now discovering what it means to live a normal life, that is, one in which post-traumatic stress does not dominate. In a way, I’ve been reborn. I still have symptoms but I recognize them quickly and work with them in order to free myself from repetitive or stuck patterns of thinking and behavior. Just this morning in my meditation, I found myself frozen in a breathing pattern that I probably learned as a three-week old coping with acute pain after a stomach operation. My face above my nose is numb and my upper body completely rigid. This strategy enabled me to deal with a difficult situation as a baby but now when the pain and danger are no longer present, it is disturbing and limiting.

John Fox’s poetry workshops might help me out. Each morning at the workshop, I’ll be sitting in a circle of writers, listening to and discussing published poems and then writing and sharing poems of our own. Perhaps I’ll take this PTSD symptom on, the latest one calling for resolution. Writing a poem about my frozen head and shallow breath might free me up. In the meantime, here’s an affirmation I’ll try: I breathe naturally and fully, energizing my entire body. Breath awakens. Breath is my friend

Radical roadmap

“A People’s Guide to Greater Boston” (University of California) is not a glossy pit of tired tourist pap. It’s a history lesson with a point of view, shining light on the city’s radical past, highlighting protests and movements and the power people of Boston have had in shaping the place they live. Authors Joseph Nevins, who grew up in Dorchester; Suren Moodilar, an activist and editor who lives in Chelsea; and Cambridge native and Harvard grad Eleni Macrakis write of sites like Grove Hall in Dorchester, where in June 1967, 50 protestors locked themselves in to demand welfare reform and were pulled out violently by police, leading to three days of rioting. Or of the Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge, which used to be home to “Old Mole,” an underground newspaper that called itself “a radical biweekly.” The book is a comprehensive exploration of Boston, its neighborhoods, and its nearby towns—Waltham, Lynn, Concord, the North and South Shores. The book pulls the curtain back on the city’s history of furthering the inequality of a capitalist world economy and perpetrating violence against natural resources. “A people’s perspective privileges the desires, hopes, and struggles of those on the receiving end of unjust forms of power and those who work to challenge such inequalities” aiming for a place “that is radically inclusive and democratic and that centers on social and environmental justice.” It’s a timely, intelligent, and necessary guide, one that deepens our understanding of where we live now and reminds us of the power that regular citizens have to work against powers and systems that are, now as then, in urgent need of change.

Medical memoir

“I claim no special powers; nor do I know how to handle death any better than you,” writes Harvard grad and ER doctor Michele Harper in her wise and elegant debut memoir, “The Beauty in Breaking” (Riverhead), which comes out this week. Harper writes of cultivating a state of stillness, one that serves her well in the ER, and one she learned in childhood living with an abusive, battering father. She writes candidly of what it is to be Black in the primarily white medical system, the lie of a post-racial America, and a glass ceiling for women that doesn’t so much shatter as bow. Wrenching scenes are balanced with Harper’s confident, steady and steadying prose. “It is only in silence that horror can persist,” she writes. With wisdom and generosity, she shows how our wounds—physical and emotional—unite us, and that we have to see where we’re broken in order to heal.

Fellowships and grants

The Mass Cultural Council recently announced the recipients of its annual artist fellowships for fiction and creative non-fiction. Out of over 600 applications, the judges selected 13 Massachusetts-based writers. Seven writers were awarded grants of $15k each, including Morris Collins of Boston, Kelle Groom of Provincetown, Daniel E. Robb of Amherst, Whitney Scharer of Arlington, Emily Shelton of Cambridge, Ann Ward of Shutesbury, and Linda Woolford of Andover. Six writers were awarded $1500, including Robert Dall of Cambridge, Justine Dymond of Belchertown, Amanda L. Giracca of Great Barrington, Matthew Muller of Pittsfield, Chivas Sandage of Northampton, and Alyssa Songsiridej of Cambridge. The National Endowment for the Arts also recently announced their grants awarded to literary arts organizations around the country. In New England, the Boston Book Festival received a $15k grant. Grub Street receives $45k. And the Telling Room in Portland, Maine receives $15k.

Coming Out

“Want”by Lynn Steger Strong (Henry Holt)

“Last One Out Shut Off the Lights”by Stephanie Soileau (Little, Brown)

Medical Memoirs Blog

“A Mind Spread Out on the Ground”by Alicia Elliott (Melville House)

List Of Memoir Books

Pick of the Week Roxie Mack at Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts, recommends “I Hotel” by Karen Tei Yamashita (Coffee House): “‘I Hotel’ is a fictional account of the lives of Asian-American activists in the late 60s and early 70s. Mirroring the fearless experimentalism of the time, Yamashita tells the story using a mix of narrative, drama, and real and fictionalized documentary passages. The story, based in many instances on actual incidents, traces the intertwined lives of a generation of Chinese, Japanese, Pilipino, and Korean revolutionaries. She brings to light intriguing parallels between the then-emerging Black Power movement and the Asian activists.”