Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
Dr. Elaine Schattner's notes on becoming educated as a patient
© Elaine Schattner, 2009, 2022 By : Template Sell.
A short note on Cutting for Stone, a novel I’ve just read by Dr. Abraham Verghese. He’s an expert clinician and professor at Stanford. The author uses rich language to detail aspects of Ethiopian history, medicine and quirks of human nature. The book’s a bit long but a page-turner, like some lives, taking a strange […]
Today we should move forward on the list published in the NEJM on Bending the Cost Curve in Cancer Care. We’re up to point 7 in our discussion, what’s 2nd in the authors’ proposed changes in attitudes and practice: “Both doctors and patients need to have more realistic expectations.” This point follows closely from the […]
A short note on a book party, fundraiser and warm celebration I attended yesterday evening. My first Facebook friend, Luis Carlos Montalván, an acquaintance from my experience at Columbia’s Journalism School, has published a wonderful book, Until Tuesday (Disney-Hyperion). I received a copy of the book at the gallery, and couldn’t put it down. Luis, […]
The situation in Japan remains grim. I can’t reasonably report on this, except to say what’s evident by the photographs, videos and usually-reliable sources: a second reactor may have ruptured. There’s been another burst of radioactivity into the air. Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being discovered in the post-Tsunami landscape along the northeast coast. The […]
I don’t know if makes sense to blog on a book by a woman who’s dead, who wrote about photographs and the news. But new media allows us to try new things, unedited. Here goes: In Regarding the Pain of Others, which I began, unknowingly, on the evening before the recent quake and tsunami, Sontag […]
Last night I began reading a long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag. The work dates to 1993, and centers on the power of photographs of war. She considers Virginia Woolf’s earlier reflections on horrific images from the Spanish Civil War, in Three Guineas. Sontag writes: “Not to be pained by these […]
“One of the ways that I gained the trust of the family is that I gave them information.” (R. Skloot, a journalist, speaking about her interactions with Henrietta Lacks’ family, Columbia University, 2/2/10)
