In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

65 Review TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS, AND CELEBRATION: AFRICAN-AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON HEALTH, ILLNESS, AGING AND LOSS Edited by Marian Gray Secundy, ACSW, Ph.D., with Lois LaCivita Nixon, Ph.D., M.P.H. 308 pp. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc., 1992. $31.95 (paper) plus $2 bulk or $4 UPS shipping. FOR centuries, medicine, doctors, health, sickness, and death have been favorite themes in literature. But only recently have medical schools incorporated literature as a tool for teaching students about themselves and their patients. Literature has now claimed a respectable place alongside scientific knowledge in most U.S. medical schools. Many of the medical stories to which students are exposed are written by and about doctors as they go about their personal and professional lives. For example, William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Stories, compiled by Robert Coles, gives us powerful and benevolent images of the physician as he works among poor and uneducated people. The doctor is the main player in these early stories, not just part of the general landscape of illness.1 Many of the newer stories, however, focus also on the patient, and give credibility to the life experiences that shape health and sickness. Jon Mukand's Vital Lines: Contemporary Fiction about Medicine is one example. Until Trials, Tribulations, and Celebrations, almost none of the anthologies looked at the web of illness, health, and death in Af rican-American culture, even though these themes pervade our literature. This collection, written by and about African-Americans, is a colorful sourcebook for educating health professionals , through stories, poems, and excerpts from novels, about the role of health, illness, aging, and death in African-American culture. The time frame for the pieces ranges from the 1920s to the 1980s, with works by many well-known African-American authors, including James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Gwendolyn Brooks. As physician and medical ethicist Edmund Pellegrino points out in his introduction, the book is about ethnicity and healing and it is intended for those who provide care for African-AmeriJournal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved · Vol. 4, No. 1 · 1993 66____________________________________________________________ cans. Editor Marian Secundy, medical ethicist and professor of medical humanities at Howard University, and collaborator Lois Nixon, have tapped a rich and neglected source of stories about sickness and death, making an outstanding contribution to the medical humanities literature. The volume begins with sharp introductory commentaries by Joanne Trautmann Banks, who teaches literature to medical students; Edmund Pellegrino, director of the Center for Advanced Medical Ethics at Georgetown University; and Ethelbert Miller, director of Afro-American Resources Center at Howard University. The book is divided into three sections. Section One— Illness and Health Seeking Behavior—introduces us to images of black physicians and doctoring in a segregated society. In Sterling Brown's poem, "Parish Doctor," the black physician is respected because he is black. Nevertheless he is only sought after folk remedies fail. For rheumatism they kill a turkey buzzard, Dry him up; rub the stiff jints with the mess... They come to see their docteur, when these fail. (p. 8) Conversely, in Alice Walker's "Strong Horse Tea," Rannie Toomer will only consider the black folk doctor's remedy when the white mailman refuses to summon the white doctor to care for her dying son. Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple in "Dr. Sidesaddle" scorns the uppity black physician who makes his money from Harlem patients and yet lives like a white person in a white neighborhood. And an excerpt from "If We Must Die" by Junius Edwards reminds us that black physicians have not always been allowed to treat white patients, especially white women. While the physician pieces remind us of our experiences in a segregated society, the pieces on birth and abortion illustrate women's experiences that transcend racism and oppression. In the poem "The Presentation" by Toi Derricotte, a new mother, exhausted from childbirth, ...waited for something wrapped like a package, something that knew its name better than she knew it; a thing she had to discover, to unwrap and count, slowly, parting the visible, (p. 22) "Abortion" by Alice Walker .. .had entered the age...

pdf

Share