A History of the Present Illness: Stories - Softcover

Aronson, Louise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620400073 ISBN 13: 9781620400074

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2014

Synopsis

A History of the Present Illness takes readers into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in America today. An elderly Chinese immigrant sacrifices his demented wife's well-being to his son's authority. A busy Latina physician's eldest daughter's need for more attention has disastrous consequences. A young veteran's injuries become a metaphor for the rest of his life. A gay doctor learns very different lessons about family from his life and his work. And a psychiatrist who advocates for the underserved may herself be crazy. Together, these honest and compassionate stories introduce a striking new literary voice and provide a view of what it means to be a doctor and a patient unlike anything we've read before.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson's writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

About this title

About the Author

Louise Aronson has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MD from Harvard. She has received the Sonora Review prize, the New Millennium short fiction award, and three Pushcart nominations. Her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and the Literary Review, among other publications. She is an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, where she cares for older patients and directs the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center and UCSF Medical Humanities. She lives in San Francisco.

From Booklist

San Francisco is the setting of this collection of 16 short stories by physician-author Aronson. The patients, families, and doctors populating these tales are clobbered by random events that alter their lives. Missed opportunities and poor decisions also get plenty of play. In one story, a physician is charged with killing a patient. In another, an angry, bratty teenage daughter runs away from home. We never learn her fate or what happens to the worrying parents. A purposeful dearth of denouement occurs in other provocation tales. The gem of the collection, “Lucky You,” recounts what happens when an 11-year-old boy tumbles down a cliff. A dog walker happens to be at the scene of the accident but is hesitant to intervene even though she has medical training. Aronson effectively illustrates just how jumbled life can be. Hope is limping barely one step ahead of sadness. Human devotion and division, responsibility to self and others are only a smidgen of the subject matter examined by talented and knowledgeable Aronson. --Tony Miksanek

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1620400073
• ISBN 13: 9781620400074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272