The Man Who Grew Two Breasts: And Other True Tales of Medical Detection

For 50 years, Berton Roueche's absorbing accounts of the unraveling of medical mysteries were a much anticipated feature of The New Yorker. At his death last spring, Roueche left behind seven new narratives that have never been published in book form. This book collects these works along with one earlier classic--all relating true tales of strange illnesses, rare diseases, and the brilliant minds who race to understand and conquer them.

Devotees of the late Roueche's Annals of Medicine column in the New Yorker will be delighted to have this collection of seven original pieces and one reprint, even though the articles are neither uniformly engrossing nor as wondrous as the medical curiosities they explore. Some of the pieces dating from the '70s-one about the diagnosis of a 24-year-old woman's muscle problems as myasthenia gravis, for example-lack Roueche's signature tension that builds between the manifestation of a puzzling medical condition and its identification, which is perhaps why they remained unpublished during his lifetime. The more recent articles tend to be cautionary, such as one that tells of a 20-year-old Denver woman, a Jehovah's Witness who refused a blood transfusion and died from aplastic anemia caused by an oral tanning agent. And physical fitness adherents will be given pause by the 30-year-old New Yorker who was hospitalized with crippling pains in her right thigh brought on by an exercise machine, a condition her doctor dubbed "thigh thinners thecitis." The resolution of the title piece, about gynecomastia, an estrogen condition that develops men's breasts, will have older readers grinning.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.