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178 BOOK REVIEWS directly, but it ripples through the BraziUan medical community, the slums, the houses of the rich high above the dump, the dump itself, and ultimately through the entire culture out of which such a medicine has grown, a culture that mirrors our own culture, in which basic health care of women, children, and the poor is sacrificed to high-tech treatment available only to the wealthy or the otherwise fortunate. Not all the stories in Imagine a Woman and Other Tales suggest the same concern with social issues as the ones I have described above. Not all the stories are as successful or intriguing. Nonetheless, Imagine a Woman is Richard Selzer's most focused and thought-provoking volume since Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (1974). It is a book in which Selzer has traded graphic, often shocking medical descriptions and images for a deep, critical look at the responses of individuals and societies to sickness and heaUng in the lives of those who experience disease and its effects. The issues raised here deserve long and careful discussion. —Charles M. Anderson University of Arkansas for the Medical Sciences John Stone, In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine. New York: Delacorte, 1990. 213 pp. Clothbound, $17.95. Emotion is customarily a disturbing subject for modern medicine, as it also sometimes is for the medical humanities. "Pure-science" physicians would see illness and treatment solely in technical terms and would view their universe of work as emotion-free. At times the medical humanities seem drawn to a similar abstractness, as when discussions of ethics focus chiefly on concepts. Even the new concern with epistemology, meant to disclose the subjectivity and uncertainty of medicine, relies on language borrowed from aesthetics (illness as "story," the patient as "text") that can provide a comfortable distance from the fear and suffering of the actual patient. To this reader, John Stone's most driving concern as a poet is this banning of feeling from the province of medicine, and his finest poems work to combat what he sees as its deadening effects and its simplistic assumptions. For instance, the subject of "Medical Conference," from Stone's first book, The Smell of Matches (1972), is the deaths of two children in London in the past year from accidental overdoses of digitalis. The poem contrasts the impersonal perspective and textbook language of the conference's presenter with the sensual, frank, and vivid speech of the poem's speaker, a physician in the audience who can hear only that the two children were "lost in London." Stone's stirring "Angor Animi," Book Reviews 179 from his third book, Renaming the Streets (1985), has moved some of my medical students to tears. In this long autobiographical prose poem, Stone involves the reader in two forms of the anguish of the spirit that he cites in the title; he details the suffering and death of David, a twenty-twoyear -old cardiac patient whom he has treated for ten years, and his own struggle and grief as all procedures finally fail. By implicitly showing himself as both a skiUed practitioner and engrossed with David's life and well-being, Stone also gives the lie in the poem to the "pure-science" beüef that there is a fundamental conflict between knowledge and feeUng. John Stone's current book, In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, is a collection of twenty-three essays originaUy written for journals like The New York Times Magazine and Discover. Most are five to six pages in length, and each is preceded by a short sketch that is sometimes only loosely connected to the essay it introduces. The book's title, of course, echoes Stone's fundamental concern as a poet, which dominates the introduction as well. There, after positing that "each of us is born" with both "Uteral" and "metaphorical" hearts (p. 3), Stone firmly aügns himself with the metaphorical heart. Being without that "seat of the emotions ," he says, "might be worse than being dead" (pp. 7, 8); he frankly admits the emotional roots of his decision to study cardiology, in his father...

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