While putting together a commentary on the relation of media ethics to alternative health practices in the United States, I found a fascinating range of historical studies. Several read like whodunits and provide fascinating trivia as well as practical information for the modern conventional physician. Norman Gevitz wrote Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (published in 1988), a scholarly review of the dominant unconventional groups—how they got started, what has happened to them over time, and their status today. In The Great American Medicine Show (published in 1991), David and Elizabeth Metzger Armstrong treat the reader to a colorfully illustrated trip through the "fringes" of health care—yesterday's and today's.

Plays can be useful for illustrating ideas and stimulating conversation in the classroom and at less formal gatherings. Two contemporary works are not only readable but also have practical applications to the world of medicine. In her long one-act play, 'Night, Mother (published in 1983), Marsha Norman admits us to an increasingly tense dialogue between a controlling mother and her middle-aged daughter as the latter systematically prepares for her own suicide. In addition to being a compelling drama, this work addresses issues of parental responsibility, truth-telling, and autonomy.

Little did Peter Barnes know when he wrote the 1976 stage script for Red Noses (published in 1985), a medieval satire about human behavior during an epidemic of the Black Death, that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome was just around the corner. The reader is reminded, in the midst of belly-laughs at thinly veiled malice, that some things just never change—such as the need of some men to scapegoat, punish the victim, and reap personal profit from disasters.

I teach medical humanities to graduate students in English and to practicing physicians and nurses. For these classes I am always seeking new "doctor stories" to illustrate ethical, historical, or cultural points. Two collections insinuated themselves into my repertoire last year: Vital Lines: Contemporary Fiction about Medicine, edited by John Mukand (published in 1990) and Arthur Conan Doyle's Tales of Humanism and Values: Round the Red Lamp, edited by Alvin Rodin and Jack Key (published in 1992). Mukand's anthology of short fiction, much of it not previously collected, is divided into categories of special interest to physicians such as illness, patients, death, recovery, and other doctors' foibles. It is not commonly known that Sherlock Holmes' creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a medical practitioner, or that in 1884 he published a book of medical stories. The editors of this collection have added other Doyle pieces, including three from the Holmes' library, that are rooted in medicine.

Finally, there are two novels in favor of which even Annals could be put aside for a few evenings. Harry Mulisch's The Assault (published in 1985) is the compelling and disturbing narrative of a Dutch boy who experiences a fearsome tragedy during his childhood and spends the rest of his life putting together the pieces scattered by his own selective amnesia. The tale is beautifully rendered and rich in pain, sensitivity, and the intrigue of a mystery that the reader solves in tandem with the narrator. Imagining Argentina (published in 1991) by Laurence Thornton is a troubling but exquisitely written dream-like account of a mystical power for envisioning the location of Argentina's "disappeareds." The book's depiction of suffering is counterbalanced by its celebration of the healing power created within the collective imagination of an oppressed people.