Every Patient Tells a Story

Lisa Sanders, MD writes the monthly column Diagnosis for the New York Times Magazine and is a consultant for the television series House, MD. Dr. Sanders was a broadcast journalist specializing in medical stories before deciding to become a doctor as her second career. She now teaches at the Yale School of Medicine as well as being a practicing internist. She collects stories of interesting diagnoses and writes about them in her NYT column and now has a book out, Every Patient Tells a Story, medical mysteries and the art of diagnosis (2009) which recounts not only the stories of patients whose illnesses were hard to diagnose, but also discusses the diagnostic process and the importance of the physical exam, a fast-disappearing art apparently as high-tech tests replace that skill in many cases.

In the introduction, the case of a young woman so jaundiced that she is "highlighter yellow" (p. xii) but does not have hepatitis, is solved by an internist who takes her history again, examines her, rereads her chart and test results and has an "aha" moment where he puts together all the clues to come up with a rare disease which he then verifies by a trip to the library and a close look at her irises to see if there is a golden ring around the outer edge. If you have watched the TV show House, you may recognize this disease from one episode.

I suspect that my friends, family and colleagues will be glad that I have finished the book so that I will no longer regale them with alarming stories of medical near-misses while they are dining. Librarians who took their lunch in the staff room this week provided a captive audience for my chapter by chapter synopses of this book. I will check it in and now it goes to the patron who saw it on my desk and asked to be put on hold for it. Enjoy, but don't come down with every symptom you read about. That's "Intern's Disease" a manifestation of the power of suggestion.

Every Patient Tells a Story is non-fiction that will appeal to fans of medical novels by Patricia Cornwell, Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, Michael Palmer, Abraham Verghese or Tess Gerritson.
Also of interest: The Medical Science of House

Carry On, Jeeves

The other week I was looking through the audiobooks on CD for something to listen to while I drove home. Nothing jumped out at me, and I didn't feel like listening to nonfiction or a mystery, my usual choices. Literary fiction is too difficult to listen to while you drive (hence my tenuous grasp of what happened in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer), and so I resignedly picked out the audiobook by P.G. Wodehouse that was on the shelf. I only knew that Anne really likes P.G. Wodehouse and we like a lot of the same books, so I tried it. I had flipped through some P.G. Wodehouse books as a teenager and found too many "I say, old chap" lines to even think about checking any of his books out.

Luckily, the audiobook (The Inimitable Jeeves) was one of the Jeeves series by Wodehouse . Jeeves is the clever valet of an endearing but unbrainy young rich man named Bertie Wooster, and Jeeves is always arranging behind the scenes so that the problem of the chapter (often humorous) comes to a natural solution.

I was also lucky enough to get a book narrated by Martin Jarvis, who has performed as Jeeves on Broadway. In the same way that Shakespeare is more intelligible when you see it performed (well, some parts of it anyway), the 1920s slang of the audio version doesn't bother me anymore. The British accents are a bit strong if you're not used to them, though. Now no other audiobooks will do but Jeeves audiobooks - I've graduated to My Man, Jeeves.

Jeeves is now thought of as a butler in popular culture (he's a valet in the Wodehouse books) and inspired askjeeves.com for a few years (which is now Jeeveless and calls itself ask.com). Other random facts: the Lodges' butler in Archie comics is named not Jeeves, but Smithers. And we think of chauffeurs as "James", as in "Home, James," which was popularized by a 1934 song.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Winifred Watson's charming 1938 novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was reprinted by Persephone Press and made into a movie fifty years after it first appeared. Miss Pettigrew is a poor, middle-aged governess who mistakenly is sent to a zany, socialite's apartment for a new job post. There, prim Miss Pettigrew becomes fast friends with Miss Delysia La Fosse, nightclub singer and bon vivant. Appearing first as a fine example of "what not to wear," Miss P. is transformed, Cinderella-like, by Miss La F. into a glamourous vision in black velvet, sparkling jewelry and, for the first time in her life, a generous application of powder, rouge and eyebrow pencil. After that, Miss Pettigrew experiences a joie de vivre she has never before felt and, not to spoil the suspense, it isn't long before romance is on the horizon for our lonely spinster.

If you like E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia (1931) series or E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Country Lady (1931), you might enjoy this light period piece.

What's With the Bathtubs, Cialis?

Regular readers of this blog know that we get some pretty odd questions at the Reference Desk, but we try to find the answers regardless of what the question is or why the person wants to know.
Today's question: what's with the people in the bathtubs at the end of every Cialis TV ad? Googling the phrase "bathtubs Cialis" turns up 2,570,000 hits - which made us realize that many people are concerned about this issue. Some of the comments online were quite creative in trying to find a reason for the bathtubs image, but we wanted the real reason from the horses mouth. So I called the helpline of Lilly, the drug company that makes Cialis. I stated the question explaining that I am a librarian and people really want to know the answer. Without skipping a beat, the operator answered,

"It's up to the interpretation of the viewer."

Period. End of story, though not unkindly. I asked her if she gets this question often since her answer was so quick and do I dare say, firm?

"Sometimes," she politely said.

I asked if Lilly would ever let the ad's creative person be interviewed or release a statement about the bathtub meaning and she said again,

"It's up to the interpretation of the viewer."

I pleaded a bit more for enlightenment, but feeling that no more information was forthcoming and wanting to end the conversation on an up note, we thanked each other and hung up.

So there you have it.

Anyone's guess is as good as anyone elses in this case. Like art, it's open to interpretation is the company's claim.

Vacation Reading continued

To continue yesterday's post about what I read while on vacation, I stopped reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (for now) once I was on Terra Firma again and had access to the pile of books on my bedside table which I had not packed.
First up: The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, the story of six year old Henry Day who runs away from home and is replaced by a hobgoblin or changeling. The childlike changelings live in the woods and wait for their chance to kidnap a small child and replace him with one of their tribe. The kidnapped child then becomes a changeling and has to wait many years to find the opportunity to get back into the human world. Meanwhile, the parents with the replacement child do not notice, or refuse to acknowledge, that their child seems somehow different. In Henry's case, the new Henry comes with an incredible musical talent that the original Henry lacked. The book alternates between the human world and the immortal, feral world of the changelings.

Somehow this summary does not do the book justice; it's one of those books which is hard to describe. If you are thinking, 'no, not interested in such a weird topic,' I would advise you to read some other reviews and most of all to give the book a try. If you liked The Time Traveler's Wife (the book, not the movie which has been soundly panned by all) the element of being outside of one's life waiting to get back in is similar. Or it would interest readers who like elements of the mystical underside of everyday life, vampire fans, perhaps, or readers of fantasy. Although I don't like vampire books or fantasy much, so the book would seem to fall between the genre cracks. Whatever niche this book is assigned, it is well worth reading.

Wikipedia's article on Yeat's poem, the Stolen Child, which inspired author Keith Donohue

more Stolen Child Reviews on BookBrowse