Experiment Perilous
Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown
by Renee C(laire) Fox, 1959Ward F-Second in a research hospital in the 1950s was occupied by doctors cum researchers, patients cum experiments. With research procedures different from what they became in the fifty years between the setting of this book and today, and with patients expected to die, Ward F-Second presents an interesting picture of medical history. Fox entered the ward as an observer with the intent of writing a sociological piece on the mechanisms of a research ward, and she did a great job.
Fox takes notes on the humor of the patients and physicians (sometimes repeating herself), commenting on its morbidity, without being judgemental. In fact, the lack of judgements in this book is refreshing and unusual; the contrasts between patients are frequently ones that would lend themselves well to judgements.
Patients in this ward are all male, which Fox does not comment on. The description of the medical conditions in this book are both technical and out of date, but they can either be skipped, without much loss of plot or point, or can be understood with a small (not quite minimal) amount of outside research or background.
Enjoyable reading.
Patient Encounters
The Experience of Disease
by James H. Buchanan, 1989 The table of contents for this book groups the chapters into diseases of the soul, metabolic furnaces, diseases of the heart, diseases of life, and acute and chronic diseases. The very first of these labels ought to tell the reader something- that this book is not the scientific book it purports to be. Buchanan avows that his stories are both true and fiction (the library of congress classifies it R726: nonfiction medicine). Each of these chapters is a poetic description of a case study of an illness. Some of the people described are real, some are not. They've all been falsified in the name of anonymity, but also in the name of poetic license.
These descriptions of "disease" are highly judgemental.
One of the diseases covered is AIDS: the case study is of a gay man who dies of AIDS and the narrator is clearly unfamiliar with the gay community; the community abandons this man, and his lifestyle is described by the narrator as sinful, and the last paragraph concludes that this is not a punishment, as though he were being merciful in saying so, as though it were a real possibility.
Another case study is about a woman whose son has progeria. Buchanan, attempting to report on the feelings of the mother and son, says that the mother is necessarily ashamed of her "monster". Buchanan again and again refers to the son with progeria as a monster.
Again and again, Buchanan's patients are helpless, humiliated, and monstrous.
Only skimworthy reading.
