Hospital
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First sentence: “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.”
Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). Medical people constantly have to fight the feeling that they are cogs in a machine. Yet they also acknowledge that changes in systems can radically improve their practice. Gladwell brilliantly gives one such example, the Goldman algorithm for chest pain, that changed the way things are done in emergency rooms and saved lives.
First sentence: “In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.”
Goldwasser, Rabbi Dovid, It Happened in Heaven (Jerusalem/New York: Feldheim Publishers, 1995). One of the dozens of VIPs Douglas Jablon introduced me to was Rabbi Goldwasser, a kind man with a long beard. His walls were lined with scholarly works, including an entire tome on the rules regulating beards. While many local rabbis were of the fire-and-brimstone school, Rabbi Goldwasser definitely belonged to the good-deeds-and-parables camp. During my visit he gave me this conversational collection of gentle stories aimed at encouraging kindness.
First sentence: “Traveling down an unfamiliar road, a man notices a magnificent palace in flames.”
Greene, Graham, The Heart of the Matter (London: William Henemann, 1948). Confession: I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I knew what my book should be called—The Heart of the Matter! In the calm of morning, I remembered the great book that already carried the name. Though I had little spare time during the reporting period, I felt the need to luxuriate in some perfect prose.
First sentence: “Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.”
Groopman, Jerome, The Anatomy of Hope (New York: Random House, 2004). The book strikes deep, especially when the oncologist writer writes about his own nineteen-year battle with unrelenting back pain. Makes his empathy for his patients—and for their incompatible desires for transparency and magic—more understandable and all the more admirable.
First sentence: “Why do some people find hope despite facing severe illness, while others do not?”
Gyatso, Tenzin, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Essence of the Heart Sutra, translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005). When Dr. Gregory Todd told me about reading the Heart Sutra to Mr. Zen, I decided I should learn something about it. This book was instructive and scholarly, yet quite easy to navigate and thought-provoking in ways I didn’t expect. The Dalai Lama has a nice sense of humor as well as spiritual depth.
First sentence: “Time is always moving forward.”
Havel, Václav, Disturbing the Peace, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). I bought this book after Alan Astrow’s spirituality conference, where a psychiatrist discussed Havel’s interpretation of hope. This book-length interview with a journalist, Karel Huizdala, records conversations that took place in 1985 and 1986, three years before the playwright Havel became his country’s president. Makes you long for serious political discourse. “Life does not take place outside history, and history is not outside of life,” said Havel.
First sentence: “Yes, I do come from a bourgeois family, you might even say from a grand-bourgeois family.”
Heschel, Abraham Joshua, Maimonides, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). [Originally published in 1935 as Maimonides, Eine Biographie, by Erich Reiss Verlag in the series “Judentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart.”] Excellent, essential biography of Maimonides, who may be associated in Borough Park mainly with the hospital named after him but is more widely known as one of the great Jewish philosophers as well as a physician.
First sentence: “Between the Sahara and the much traveled Mediterranean Sea, between the monumental civilization of ancient Egypt and the emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean, lies a land the Arabs fancifully call Maghreb, the Occident, or Barbary, and which geographers simply refer to as North Africa, the northern appendage of a larger continent.”
———, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951). From time to time, I would walk through the streets of Borough Park in the hours before sunset on Fridays, before the Sabbath, and try to absorb the shift in mood I could feel as it occurred. Written with poetic elegance and depth, Heschel’s meditation addresses a longing for a time and place apart.
First sentence: “Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space.”
Kessler, Andy, The End of Medicine (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Too cutesy. Didn’t make it past chapter 1.
First sentence: “We were on our third pitcher when the conversation started getting interesting.”
Kidder, Tracy, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003). This book is very alive. It’s about the saintly-annoying-righteous-humbling-doctor-crusader-anthropologist Paul Farmer and contains exotic locations, real global-health issues, and the truthful feel of a good novel.
First sentence: “Six years after the fact, Dr. Paul Edward Farmer reminded me, ‘We met because of a beheading, of all things.’”
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying (New York: Touchstone, 1997). Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist, first published this classic work in 1969, and it remains the crucial text for anyone thinking about how people contend with the final stages of death.
First sentence: “When I was asked if I would be willing to write a book on death and dying, I enthusiastically accepted the challenge.”
Lesser, May H., An Artist in the University Medical Center (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1989). My friend Danny Gregory, who thinks in pictures as well as words, gave me this lovely book of drawings, paintings, and text that helped me organize my own thoughts about this arcane world.
First sentence (and drawing): “This is the large weekly teaching conference for doctors-in-training and faculty—called grand rounds.”
Maimonides, Moses ben Maimon, Ethical Writings of Maimonides, edited by Raymond L. Weiss with Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Dover Publications, 1975). I bought this book specifically to read the Maimonides treatise “On the Management of Health” but was just as intrigued by the sage’s thoughts on character traits and the art of logic. Always good to go back to the source.
First sentence: “Laws concerning character traits: They include altogether eleven commandments, five positive commandments and six negative commandments.”
Maugham, W. Somerset, Of Human Bondage (New York: Doubleday, 1915). I hadn’t read this since I was a kid, when I was mesmerized by Philip’s infatuation with Mildred the waitress. Still mesmerized, but now with medicine on my mind, I was stuck on a phrase Maugham uses to describe the young doctor’s (narcissistic) attitude toward his patients: “There was humanity there in the rough, the materials the artist worked on; and Philip felt a curious thrill when it occurred to him that he was in the position of the artist and the patients were like clay in his hands.”
First sentence: “The day broke gray and dull.”
Millman, Marcia, The Unkindest Cut: Life in the Backrooms of Medicine (New York: William Morrow, 1976). This sociological report was deliberately unbalanced. “I did not write extensively about the many ‘good’ things that I observed doctors do, for I was interested in calling attention to the problems I saw,” Millman writes in the introduction. Written in a just-the-facts-ma’am style, the book is more alarming than enlightening.
First sentence: “Mr. Bernstein was lying on a stretcher, still awake but heavily tranquilized in preparation for open heart surgery.”
Nuland, Sherwin B., Maimonides (New York: Schocken, 2005). A good primer on the life of Maimonides, though the best chapter is the first, called “My Son, the Doctor: Jews and Medicine.”
First sentence: “Why is it, in fact, that so many Jews have become doctors?”
Patterson, Kerry; Grenny, Joseph; McMillan, Ron; and Switzler, Al, Crucial Conversations (New Y
ork: McGraw-Hill, 2002). This was the “textbook” for Dr. Feldman’s Code of Mutual Respect classes. I was ready to dismiss it as psychobabble but came to respect the authors’ plain-spoken commonsense advice, which evidently is not so common.
First sentence: “When people first hear the term ‘crucial conversation,’ many conjure up images of presidents, emperors, and prime ministers seated around a massive table while they debate the future of the world.”
Potok, Chaim, The Chosen (New York: Ballantine, 1967). One day after watching the little boys from Yeshiva Kehilah Yakov Pupa, the Orthodox school next door to Maimonides, play ball, I decided to look again at this book that I remembered fondly from childhood. Much as I, as a girl in Ohio, had enjoyed the story about the struggle to claim tradition, I appreciated it more deeply as I walked the streets the characters walked.
First sentence: “For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence.”
Rosner, David, A Once Charitable Enterprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). What changes, what remains the same. Excellent academic history of hospitals in Brooklyn and New York City a century ago.
First sentence: “Nineteenth-century American life revolved around small communities and narrow personal contacts.”
Shem, Samuel, The House of God (New York: Bantam Dell, 1978). When I told an orderly (now called “patient transporter”) I was writing a book about his hospital, he broke out laughing. “You better read The House of God,” he said with a sly look. I understood his reaction immediately on reading the first sentence of this book, inspired by the author’s internship at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in the 1970s (Samuel Shem is the nom de plume of Stephen Joseph Bergman, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School). As David Gregorius might say, “Woo-hoo!”
First sentence: “Except for her sunglasses, Berry is naked.”
Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, 1978 and 1988, 1989). Sontag’s son wrote a chilling article in the New York Times Magazine about his mother’s horrible death from cancer. Her insistence on treatment against the advice of most doctors was the subject of biopsychosocial rounds and led me to read this fascinating, provocative book, whose defiant stance weighs heavy in light of Sontag’s own final chapter.
First sentence: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”
Solzhenitzyn, Aleksandr, Cancer Ward, translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bethel and David Burg (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). By the time I finished this book, it was festooned with pink, yellow, and blue Post-it notes scribbled with true but unhelpful exclamations: “Brilliant!” “No wonder he won the Nobel Prize!” That sort of thing. It is a truly great book.
First sentence: “On top of everything, the cancer wing was Number 13.”
Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982). My health-policy pals told me I had to read this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, if I was going to write about an American hospital. They were right, though I soon realized at five hundred-plus pages that it was too heavy to lug around. I bought another copy and chopped it up into chunks that fit nicely into my bag. Worth the trouble.
First sentence: “The dream of reason did not take power into account.”
Toynbee, Polly, Hospital (London: Hutchinson, 1977). Alan Astrow recommended this book by a British journalist. I like Toynbee’s intelligent, deadpan realism. Her book is written in the spirit of Frederick Wiseman’s fine documentary film (another) Hospital.
First sentence: “It was eight o’clock in the morning and the ward Sister was coming on duty.”
Welles, Orson, with Oja Kodar, The Big Brass Ring (London: Black Spring Press, 1987). Convoluted and overwrought, or adventuresome and expansive, but very large either way, like Welles himself—and required reading for anyone interested in his life and work.
First sentence: “FADE IN: A montage—or maybe a filmed collage is more accurate.”
Author’s Note
Throughout my research, I always identified myself as a writer working on a book. The Maimonides administration placed one limit, asking me to protect the confidentiality of patients. While all the patients discussed in the book gave me permission to speak to them and tell their stories, I have altered patient names and identities to protect privacy.
Index
Aaron (biblical character)
Abdel-Rahman, Omar
abortion procedure, late-term
Abuasi, Nidal
acupuncture
AIDS
airplane pilots
Aithal, Sramila
Al Quds Day
Alliance for Quality Health Care
Al-Noor School
Altman, Estee
Alvord, Dean
American Medical Association
Aron Pavilion, Maimonides Medical Center
Ascher, Enrico
Aschkenasy, Paul
Aschkenasy, Peter
Association of American Medical Colleges
Astrow, Alan
and Aaron Twerski
as administrator
background
at biopsychosocial discussions regarding Ms. Hernandez
in cast of characters
and Crucial Conversations meeting
description
diagnosed with Crohn’s disease
faculty staff choice between Warshawsky and Razaq
father’s illness
hired as chief of hematologic oncology at Maimonides new cancer center
injury to forehead
medical education
and Mr. Doctor
at National Cancer Survivors Day celebration
as organizer of spirituality colloquiums
overcomes lisp
and patient Marie and her sister Tina
at St. Vincent Hospital
trip to Sharon Kopel’s funeral
Astrow, Alan (cont.)
viewed by his friend Daniel Sulmasy
wife Jill
Astrow, Raphael
Ateres Chynka
Baldwin, Jo Ann
Bashevkin, Michael
bed management
Bellevue Hospital Center
Ben Casey
Berger Commission
Berman, Sheldon
Biberfeld, Marcel
Bikur Cholim
biopsychosocial meetings
case of Ms. Hernandez
communication as theme and variations
originally organized by Allan Novetsky
blind shiek
Bloomberg, Michael
B’nai Jeshuran
Borgen, Patrick
Botox
Bowie, David
Brezenoff, Stanley
in cast of characters
compared with Pamela Brier
hired to head Maimonides
hires Bill Camilleri to build cancer center
hires Pam Brier as his second-in-command
hires Steven Davidson to run ER
initial view of cancer center feasibility
institutes policy of community engagement
leaves Maimonides
and Makki Mosque
relationship with Joseph Cunningham
relationship with Lillian Fraidkin
role in Kopel-Bashevkin feud
as spectral presence at budget meeting
Brier, Jenny
Brier, Pamela
as administrator at Jacobi Medical Center
aftermath of automobile accident
aftermath of Septemberattacks
agrees to journalist’s request for year-long access
automobile accident
background
budgetary and numbers issues
in cast of characters
as chief operating officer under Stanley Brezenoff
compared with Stanley Brezenoff
continuing desire that Maimonides have the first New Year’s baby
and Daniel Dube
description
as executive director at Bellevue Hospital Center
in executive suite of offices at Maimonides
first view of Maimonides
five-year progress report
at groundbreaking for new cancer center
holds town-hall meetings
honored at charity function
husband Peter Aschkenasy
at joint Maimonides-Kingsbrook event
at Juneboard meeting
labor-management issues
meets with cleaning staff
at opening of new cancer center
and pain management
and partnership with Victory Memorial Hospital
as “pooh-bah,”
relationship with Allan Strongwater
relationship with Bill Camilleri
relationship with David Cohen
relationship with Jacob Shani
relationship with Jay Cooper
relationship with Joseph Cunningham
relatioship with Steven Cymbrowitz
seeks to make good behavior a hospital goal
talk at Makki Mosque
view of Hatzolah contretemps
view of Kopel-Bashevkin feud
visits Marty Markowitz in hospital
Brier, Steven
Brown, Robert
Brownian motion
Bryan LGH Medical Center, Lincoln, Nebraska
Buddhism
Bush, Barbara
Bush, George W.
Calamia, Vincent
Camilleri, Bill
in cast of characters
description
hired to build cancer center
makes changes at Maimonides
at National Cancer Survivors Day celebration
question of his leaving
relationship with Pam Brier
rushes to finish cancer center conference room
cancer center, Maimonides
biopsychosocial meetings
budgetary issues
JCAHO inspection