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The Plague Legends
"Saint Anastasius: his head as an amulet against plague and witchcraft." Wellcome Collection. She wears a red skirt. She is sometimes a goat. She is a hag. She is beautiful. She is two people: an old...
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Time
An engineering illustration depicting large cogs meshing together and diagrams of epicycloid curves. Color lithograph, circa 1905, by Stanislas Petit, via Wellcome Collection. Guernica Sketches are...
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Naloxone
Image: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Sevilla via Flickr Right after I injected heroin, I always made a beeline for Clark Street. I’d leave my sparse one-bedroom apartment, take the...
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On Metaphors and Snow Boots
Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash The strata of five snowfalls cover the ground as I climb out of bed one February morning. Ice-powder-ice-powder-ice: they lie according to the usual pattern of Iowa...
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Ketamine
Internet Archive Book Images, via Flickr “How will I know if I’m getting better?” asks my teenage patient. I’m treating him for depression, and lately he’s been thinking about driving his car off the...
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Oxygen
An iron lung, St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London: a patient inside a Drinker respirator, attended to by a nurse and a doctor. Photograph, ca. 1930 (?). Image via Wellcome Collection. When we breathe,...
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Unborn
Morula, Susan Lockhart. Image via Wellcome Collection. People who want to ban abortion often refer to fetuses, regardless of their stage of development, as unborn babies. Curious, I looked up...
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Postpartum
Photo via Internet Archive Book Images In 1966, seven years before Roe v. Wade was decided, Roz Doneen missed her period. She was fifteen. Her parents pulled her out of high school and sent her twenty...
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IUD
Image: +mara via Flickr. In her late thirties, while on a weekend ski trip, my mother began to bleed so heavily that the blood seeped through her Gore-Tex pants. On the drive to the hospital, she...
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Amniocentesis
Fetal cells from amniotic fluid in culture. Photo by the Wessex Regional Genetics Centre. Our cultural script on pregnancy insists on certainty. Whether the authorities are doctors or majority-male...
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Pregnancy
Hryhorii Havrylenko, “Pregnant. Fragment,” 1956–c. 1958. Image via WikiArt. I am my mother’s kitindamimba; my son is my kifunguamimba. These are, respectively, the Swahili terms for lastborn and...
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Body Politic
Image: AndreaLaurel via Flickr The doctor who arrived in my wife’s recovery room to perform our son Sebastian’s circumcision was a mix of Foghorn Leghorn and Huey P. Long, a gentleman from another...
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Placebo
Illustration from Internet Archive Book Images via Flickr Every week or so, a patient comes into my clinic with back or shoulder pain. These patients’ MRIs are spotless, and they have been told by...
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Insensible Loss
Photo by Polina Hedzenko via Pexels I spend my days and nights invading strangers’ bodies. I put my finger in their mouths and gag them, feeling for firmness suggesting tumors; I snake a thin camera...
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Extraction
Image via Flickr I first remember being ashamed of my teeth at five. We were guests at the wedding of my second cousin to a man who looked like Tim Curry as Johnny LaGuardia. I was hopelessly in love...
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Doctors, Not Dealers
Photo by Alexandros Chatzidimos via Pexels. To access methadone in America, you might have to set your daily alarm to 4:00 a.m. — maybe earlier, if you live in a rural part of the country, like South...
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Sound Shadow
Photo from British Library via Flickr I needed hearing aids, and because I needed them, I didn’t want them. “According to this chart your loss is considered moderate.” “But it goes away,” I said,...
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This Back Is a Familiar Back
Illustration by Gustave Doré via Old Book Illustrations Ye-suh lay awash in the lime glow of her cat-shaped night-light, waiting. “Mom, story,” she ordered me. “Story, please.” “Normal story?” “Scary...
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The Paradox
Illustration by Prachi Gupta It’s not very often that the word “necessary” in a book review feels, well, necessary. And yet, more than perhaps any other book to come across my desk this year, I want...
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Soft, Spotted Animal
Photo by Josh Massey / Unsplash It is evening, the last weekend in August, and I am trying to remember what it is like to wear shorts. Sundresses and bathing suits too. I sit on the granite-studded...
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