The Best Medicine: Stories of Healing

by Theodore Dalrymple (editor)

This unique collection of medical stories approaches its theme from many eras and perspectives. Some of the authors included were themselves physicians, notably Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and William Carlos Williams. Bulgakov, too, draws on his own experience as a doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story from Asylum Piece , takes a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic, and Lorrie Moore's witty, grief-stricken Mother in 'People Like Us Are the Only People Here' examines the feelings of a parent with a child in the Paediatric Oncology war - 'Peed Onk'. Maupassant, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Graham Greene, O. Henry, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro all feature. Doctors observe patients; patients observe doctors. Nurses go about their important business, not always appreciated. Not quite everyone is healed. The meaning of illness - does it have any? - and of life itself, is called into question - and all in the most entertaining way imaginable.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Medicine, Medical, Short Stories

512 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

Anthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.

In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.

Reviews

[A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A Doctor’s Visit”, Anton Chekhov, 9/10.
“The Forger”, Samuel Warren, 6/10
“The Hard and the Human”, Elizabeth Berridge, 8.5/10
“Sweethearts”, Arthur Conan Doyle, 5/10
“The Embroidered Towel”, Mikhail Bulgakov, 9/10
"The Body Snatchers", Robert Louis Stevenson, 6/10
"Minus One", J.G. Ballard, 4/10
“Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri, 10/10
“Back to Back”, WW Jacobs, 6/10
“A Coup d’État,” Guy de Maupassant, 7/10
“Doctor Crombie”, Graham Greene, 7.5/10
“Airing A Grievance”, Anna Kavan, 6/10
“Lord Mountdrago”, W. Somerset Maugham, 7/10
“I Had to Go Sick”, Julian Maclaren Ross, 7/10
"“People Like That are the Only People Here,” Lorrie Moore, 10/10.
Really more like 11/10. 100/10. ∞/10.
"“Swept and Garnished,” Rudyard Kipling, 6.5/10
“Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” O. Henry, 5/10
“Amy Foster”, Joseph Conrad, 6/10
“Lady With A Lamp”, Dorothy Parker, 2/10
“Life-Line”, Robert A. Heinlein, 7/10
“I Will Keep Her Company”, Rhys Davies, 5/10
“The Moons of Jupiter”, Alice Munro, 10/10

This is the second of these Everyman's Library Pocket Classics anthologies that I've read. The first was called Dog Stories, which I read because I'd recently gotten a puppy. This one I read because I'm in residency--in other words, because I'd recently become a doctor. One of the pleasures of Dog Stories, in addition to the quality of the stories themselves, is the sheer breadth of the ground they cover in terms of humans and the various facets of their relationships to dogs; it was as thrilling to recognize myself in some of those stories as it was not to recognize myself in others. There's something similar in the impulse to read these stories, which I did at the glacial pace--six months, approximately 196 hours per story--that seems to be my default these days. But there are key differences, not all of them favorable to this collection. One is that unlike our relationship with our dogs, medicine is endlessly protean, its core tenets and surface-level day-to-day changing rapidly over the years; this means that the actual medicine practiced in many of these stories is more or less unrecognizable to me now, lacking as it does anything resembling an evidence base ("The Forger," "Back to Back", "Lord Mountdrago"). The other difference is that although many of these writers are doctors, more of them are not--and they're either guessing at the practice of medicine in ways that I don't think really capture what it means to work in this field, or else the actual medicine and physicianship is secondary to the actual narrative concerns the writer has, and this isn't really a medicine story so much as a story that happens to have a doctor (usually a psychiatrist), in it: "Minus One", "Swept and Garnished", "Amy Foster" come to mind here. This is also a failure on the part of the editor, Theodore Dalrymple. A secondary consequence of this too is that certain aspects of the medical profession--public health, scutwork, research, consult etiquette, nursing pages--are entirely neglected here, and therefore it seems less comprehensive in its reach than Dog Stories did. Ultimately, the high points of the book--"Interpreter of Maladies", "People Like That Are The Only People Here", "The Embroidered Towel", and the revelatory "Moons of Jupiter" which closes the collection--redeem the book. These are the stories which remind me of the reason that I got into medicine, which is that it's the greatest of all arenas to observe the human condition, to see people at their worst and best, their most cringeworthy and their most resilient, their most characteristic and their strangest. And this goes not just for patients but for staff too, the sizeable amount of the world's population that chooses to get up every morning and make a life out of this life-preserving force. The stories in this book that do the best justify my belief in medicine as being sufficiently rich in human matter to provide for great literature. Eighteen months of residency has yet to beat this reverence out of me; small wonder that this book of 22 stories was even less able to encompass it more than a handful of times.

[Bert van der Vaart · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice edition of short stories each having something to do with healing (or not). I liked dipping in and out of these stories, especially from some authors I have not normally experienced as short story writers. Many stories saw death from the eyes of the doctor administering to the patient--whether a subject that was to be hanged or babies to be delivered. Some passages were memorable from that vantage point:

Speaking of a loss in her idealism, a woman doctor (in "The Hard and the Human" by Elizabeth Berridge) writes "But years pass and peaks become plains; the war against disease and germs becomes a routine thing. You win and you lose and miracles sometimes happen. I am old, she thought. I fight in my own way."

Describing a blue bay in England, Conan Doyle writes "I loved it when its great face was freckled with the fishing boats, and I loved it when the big ships went past, far out, a little hillock of white and no hull, with topsails curved like a bodice, so stately and demure. But most oof all I loved it when no trace of man marred the majesty of Nature, and when the sun-bursts slanted down on it from between the drifting rain-clouds. Then I have seen the further edge draped in the gauze of the driving rain, with its thin grey shading under the slow clouds, while my headland was golden, and the sun gleamed upon the breakers and struck deep through the green waves..."

In Bulgakov's contribution, a young doctor struggles to gain respect against patients who thought he was still a student: "'No, I'm qualified,' I would answer sullenly, thinking: 'I must start wearing spectacles, that's what I must do." But there was no point in this, as I had perfectly good vision, my eyes as yet included by experience."

One of the most enjoyable short stories was by WW Jacobs, who wrote about a worker trying to get off work by feigning disability from what he termed was an "accident', but where the periodic visits from the Company doctor led to a series of very funny and increasingly difficult to hide inconsistencies.

The stories examine the limits as well as arrogance of doctors, and the plusses and minuses of hospital institutions. Graham Green pillories the "arrogant doctors" by describing one Dr Crombie who steadfastly maintains that "sexual congress" is "the most frequent" cause of cancer--maintaining that "[a]lmost one hundred percent of those who die of cancer have practised sex."

There is of course also poignancy--as when in an excellent story written by Lorrie Moore, a mother whose baby is diagnosed with cancer: "The room is fluorescently ablaze again. The Mother digs around in her parka pocket and comes up with a Kleenex. It is old and thin, like a mashed flower saved from a dance; she dabs it at her eyes and nose." and "It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science', says the Mother. 'But when they start referring to it as 'an art', I get extremely nervous."

Heinlein gets a few shots off against academicians in his contribution, "Life-Line": "To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority."

Dalrymple selected from a wide range of authors, Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Conrad, JG Ballard, Bulgakov, Graham Greene, Robert Heinlein, Jhumpa Lahiri, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Alice Munroe, and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name some of them.

After all this good stuff, why only three stars? Enjoyable as some of the stories were, this collection was like bird shot in terms of the practice of medicine. Once read is enough to make that point. I am ready to donate the book to our nearest Free Little Library.

[JoséMaría BlancoWhite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Buenos y malos como en botica.

[airy xie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tulisan yang baik tidak hanya cerita yang membuat kita ingin terus membaca, tapi juga cerita yang membuat kita ingin turut menulis.

Begitulah perasaan ketika selesai membaca buku ini.

[Madeline Singleton · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite stories were:

Sweethearts
The Embroidered Towel
Minus One
Airing a Grievance
People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk
The Moons of Jupiter

[Sudie Velazquez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Some of the stories I liked better than others. Some were very boring and I didn’t like the way it was written but a lot of them had me glued to the page and left me wanting more of the story.