New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company
2026, 192 pages 
ISBN 9781324105695 

Your body speaks to you every moment of the day. In normal circumstances (good health), we hardly pay attention to those signals – the reassuring metronome-like steadiness of the radial pulse or the soft, regimented inhalations/expirations of respiration. But in bad times (illness and injury), we cannot ignore altered rhythms and abnormal emanations – the miserable throbbing of a migraine or wormlike twitching of the muscles of the hand. Megan O’Rourke, a poet and author of the superb memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), has assembled a pensive and probing anthology of illness poetry that addresses altered states of the body. These 83 poems are organized into five sections: diagnosis, clinical encounters, caregiving, “metaphysical reckoning,” and recovery. A sense of betrayal by the body, shame, helplessness, isolation and loneliness, altered interpersonal relationships, and an inescapable confrontation with mortality are some common effects of illness expressed in these poems. Yet other poems communicate impressive fortitude, resiliency, revelation, receipt of compassion, and hope. Many notable writers are represented in the collection including Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Sylvia Plath, James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Blake. In “lumpectomy eve,” Lucille Clifton eerily depicts the difficult night before scheduled breast surgery where a fear of loss is just one of many emotions felt. Ted Kooser’s “The Urine Specimen” combines imagery and whimsy about the excreted waste product (“the heat of this gold your body’s melted and poured out into a form”) with a bit of scientific prophecy (“for the doctor, who in it will read your future, wringing his hands”). “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass is a prose poem skillfully and sorrowfully addressing infatuation and imperfection. A single poem cannot reliably rescue us from sickness or other misfortunes, but the best of them are certainly capable of offering connection, illumination, and comfort. 

The Human Remains: Drawing Out Compassion in Medicine by Nathan A. Gray 

University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi (an imprint of Penn State University Press)
2026, 256 pages 
ISBN 9781637791059 

The experience of gross anatomy lab in the first year of medical school has a heavy, haunting presence in this graphic memoir of medical education. Employing primarily grayscale art technique, author and illustrator Nathan Gray (a palliative care physician) holds nothing back in this sometimes grim recollection of his training. He describes the required dissection of a cadaver as “dismantling a human body” (p10) and worries about fainting or vomiting. He has recurrent macabre dreams of dancing with the cadaver. Gray begins having doubts as to whether he even belongs in medical school. Fortunately for him, one member of his dissection team provides a well-needed dose of humor and bravado. In his second year of medical school, Gray gets married. His third year clinical rotations start with the surgery clerkship where feelings of insecurity, uselessness, and fear pester him. Yet Gray is emotionally and psychologically aided by receiving small acts of kindness, his sustained wonder of the human body, and a genuine interest in the patients he treats. Upon completing medical school, he enters an internal medicine residency noteworthy for a strenuous schedule with nights on call and some shifts spanning more than 30 hours in the hospital. He labels residency training as “a cruel matchup that pitted our own sanity and survival against the needs of the people we cared for” (p170). Gray chooses a palliative care fellowship where his compassion and joy for practicing medicine are reinvigorated thus completing the arc of his journey infused with the humanity and empathy he originally began medical school with. The Human Remains is the second graphic medical memoir (See One, Do One, Teach One by Grace Farris is the other.) published in 2026. Both are cautionary tales (albeit with “happy endings”) reminding us that medical trainees are at high risk of having the most important things that propel them to choose to become a physician – compassion and service to others – gradually eroded. 

“The News from Dublin” in The News from Dublin: Stories (pages 67-87) by Colm Tóibín 

New York, NY: Scribner
2026, 289 pages 
ISBN 9781476785141 
[The story was first published in New Irish Short Stories.] 

Maurice Webster, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Ireland, has good reason to worry about the condition of his youngest brother. Stephen has a severe case of highly infectious tuberculosis and is confined to home, (At the time this story takes place – prior to the wide availability of streptomycin in Europe around 1948 – there is no antibiotic treatment for TB.) Maurice is afraid to visit his brother and risk spreading TB to his wife and children. Reports surface of a promising new drug that can cure tuberculosis – Streptomycin. The antibiotic is almost impossible to obtain as it is still being tested and likely won’t be accessible for more than a year. Poor Stephen will not live long enough to receive the medication. Maurice travels to Dublin for a meeting with the minister of health in an attempt to procure Streptomycin for his brother. Although sympathetic, the health official says he is unable to help and recommends that Stephen be admitted to a sanatorium. A morose Maurice returns home understanding that Stephen and family were counting on him to retrieve the antibiotic. He has failed them. The only thing he has brought back from Dublin is bad news. With ever diminishing hope for his brother’s recovery, even a miracle seems out of the question. Maurice decides, “There had been enough prayers said, and they had made no difference” (p86). This compact, touching tale about the effect of serious illness on family members highlights their desperation and guilt, withering hope and reluctant resignation. 

Web photo by Wes Hicks

Esther, daughter of a native healer who has some familiarity with and respect for Western medicine, envies and longs for Antonia’s Western training and attaches herself to her as a disciple. In her encounters with patients, Esther finds that she has an inexplicable gift for healing which baffles her as well as Antonia and complicates their already tenuous relationship. Esther’s gift forces Antonia to reexamine some of her most basic assumptions about what constitutes healing. 

The novel raises complex questions about the cultural, religious, and institutional contexts of medicine in a delicately drawn portrayal of relationships among characters whose divergent frames of reference complicate trust and understanding. One of the questions the novel addresses is not only how to heal the body, but how to heal the breach between cultures. In the development of the friendship between the American doctor and the African healer these questions are worked out in concrete particulars that fully honor both the pain and the hope involved in authentic cross-cultural dialogue. 

Antonia Saw the Oryx First
Maria Thomas 
Soho Press, New York 2007: 296 pages 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.  
Web image by medhum.org.

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Beloved by Toni Morrison 

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Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell 

Howard Trachtman 01.01.26 1278

Before the late 1960s, when someone had a medical emergency, their best hope was a “swoop and scoop” rescue. A police van or a hearse—if one appeared at all—would load up and drive the patient, unattended, unrestrained, to a hospital emergency department. On arrival, there was often little that could be done. In American Sirens, journalist Kevin Hazzard, himself a paramedic, reveals the story of the first fully trained paramedics who practiced life-saving medicine beyond hospital walls. Celebrated in Hazzard’s account are the Black men from the segregated Hill District of Pittsburgh that the visionary physician Peter Safar, inventor of CPR, recruited and trained. 

Safar’s 1967 project to train and hire unemployed men from a community organization known as Freedom House was initially met with derision. How, his colleagues asked, could he trust people with a high school education, or less, to endure intensive medical training and perform it flawlessly? The training included fifty instruction hours in anatomy and physiology, more time learning CPR, advanced first aid, defensive driving, and medical ethics. Trainees also learned how to treat cardiac conditions, diabetic emergencies, bleeds, spinal and pelvic fractures, and overdoses. Most controversially, they were taught how to intubate patients. While only 24 participants in Safar’s first class of 44 succeeded, those who did provided evidence that paramedics were fully capable of saving lives. According to Hazzard, Safar’s emergency response project became the national standard. 

Hazzard folds the project’s success into the stories of the men—all men at first—who took pride in contributing their life-saving skills to their community. Many of their lives changed direction in the process. Primary among them was John Moon, whose biography and dedication engagingly move the narrative forward. However, Hazzard also recounts how the project’s success met opposition from White residents wary of Black paramedics, a city government reluctant to fund them, and medically untrained police who felt upstaged. The final chapters recount the unravelling of the Freedom House first responders by the mayor of Pittsburgh. By 1975, political forces defunded the Freedom House crews and created a city-sponsored EMS run by the police. Only a few of the Freedom House paramedics chose to join or remain on the city ambulances. Most notable was John Moon, who rose in the ranks, recruited paramedics from low-income neighborhoods, and continues to keep the legacy of Freedom House alive. 

In addition to introducing readers to the Freedom House crews, Hazzard also suspensefully recounts the vicissitudes of several determined physicians who defended their project against professional and political resistance. He briefly pauses that narrative to sketch the fascinating history of emergency care through the last two millennia: from early Christian religious orders through nineteenth-century cities and twentieth-century European and American wars. Hazzard skillfully constructs his coherent narrative of Freedom House from a patchwork of source materials: principally, extensive interviews with John Moon; interviews with Freedom House founder Philip Hallen; the records of Freedom House; contemporaneous news reports; histories of medicine; medical journals; the memoir of Peter Safar; and the meticulous diaries and papers of his colleague, Nancy L. Caroline. She also trained the paramedics, rode ambulances with them, and wrote the first and still standard textbook, National Training Course, Emergency Medical Technician, Paramedic: Course Guide. 

Overall, American Sirens offers a detailed and comprehensive account of a little-known moment in the history of medicine that’s had enduring consequences. By reviving that story, Kevin Hazzard begins to rectify the racial injustice that the first paramedics experienced in their lives and again when their achievements were nearly forgotten. 

Readers interested in meeting John Moon and others central to the Freedom House story, can view the excellent PBS documentary from WQED Pittsburgh, Freedom House Ambulance: The First Responders (first aired January 2023). In a little less than 30 minutes, it underscores the political and economic conditions in which Freedom House was founded to serve the severely neglected Hill community. Interviewed residents recall incidents when police refused, on flimsy grounds, to transport community residents to hospitals. Most of all, the documentary confirms the pride, dedication, and dignity of the first of the first responders. Their story deserves to be known: https://www.pbs.org/video/freedom-house-ambulance-the-first-responders-nl3kcq/ 

Fans of the series The Pitt might remember a patient in Episode 8 who was one of the Freedom House paramedics. 

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics 
Kevin Hazzard 
Grand Central Publishing 2022: 336 pages 


A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed). 
Web image from Heinz History Center