On a couple of gifts received this holiday season...The first is a newish memoir-stroke-expose which pretty much violates every IRB and HIPAA regulation known to medicine -- not to mention some sort of personal honor code one should have to adopt in order to become a physician. Anyway... written by a attending psychiatrist at the (in)famous Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the US, Weekends at Bellevue is perhaps the worst book ever written on severe mental illness and the role of the provider. Not to hyperbolize, but any doc who refers to her patients as "crazy" (she's a psychiatrist for chrissake), who writes about her propensity for literally sniffing out male pheromones, intern sex (ew), how her ass looks in scrubs and, let's be honest, has a lot of unexamined contempt for the mentally ill, gets her book tossed swiftly in the trash. Sorry, Santa.
But, never fear. There is also the now-quite-ancient and excellent book entitled Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body (2004) written by the intriguing and somewhat controversial Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist and lecturer at Imperial College London. This history and popular-science sampler is humane and insightful, taking on difficult questions of genetic variation and social interpretation. "Injustice creeps in through the cracks of our ignorance... It is to finally close off those cracks" that we should be looking at human variety. He is speaking about genetics, of course, but mayn't this well be applied to other work, needing not to be resurrected here? I think so.
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