1 comments about Simone Weil: On Politics, Religion And Society (Women of Ideas series).

1. This slim volume on Weil is unlike all others (and there are many others) I've read. Frost and Bell-Metereau have obviously read Weil quite extensively and have a good working knowledge of the important secondary literature (but in English only it seems). Their selection of quotes are quite a propos, too. What I found odd about the book was its apologist tone. The authors seem overly eager to "justify" Weil's views, especially her spiritual/religious views, to what they evidently sense may be a hostile post-modern audience. Hence one gets the impression that Simone Weil needs somehow to be "rehabilitated" to reach the now-sophisticated post-Y2K reader. I'm not sure that's necessary (or appropriate), but their attempt is interesting nonetheless for the light it sheds on just how far foundational philosophical and metaphysical discourse has evidently fallen into embarrassing disrepute these days. Perhaps theirs is the only way to present such thinkers as Weil to the cyber generation. But I hope not.

No comments about Forty Years of American Life.

No comments about Out Came the Sun: One Family's Triumph over a Rare Genetic Syndrome.

1 comments about Practicing and Other Stories.

1. Practicing and Other Stories
   A Memoir
   Ralph G. DePalma, MD

   Xlibris Corporation
   (...)
   

   These are stories, good stories, of another age in medicine. It was an age without intensive care medicine, blood gas analysis, advanced radiographic techniques, female medical students, Medicaid and malpractice. It was an age of house calls in a dark suit and tie. The black bag, a symbol, and the badge of the profession contained real substance: penicillin, Thorazine, a stethoscope of course and batteries for the otoscope. The best stories are of that practice, its diagnostic and therapeutic triumphs, its everyday work as told by a natural storyteller. In those dear, dead times the doctor formed his opinions using the techniques of physical diagnosis with no short cuts. He checked his results, its successes and failures over bowling, not golf, with general practice doctors who, like the author were engaged in the trench war medicine of family practice.
   But the author, unlike his friends the GP's eventually traveled far from home, the Bronx, through Columbia College, and the New York University Medical school. He left home and the Bronx but retained the influence, the warmth of his upbringing in a Catholic, first generation Italian home. In his travels, he encountered and was shaped by the societal, the sexual and the medical revolutions of the last half of the twentieth century. He lived and flourished in the ups and downs of surgical residency, practicing family medicine in an isolated American military community in southern Spain and excelling in academic surgical practice. These are the stories of Practicing and Other Stories.
   In this informative autobiographical saga the stories spin on through University life in Cleveland, Chairmanships of surgical departments as diverse as Washington DC and Reno, Nevada. These were as different from one another as the distance between them.
   We sense the author's restlessness as he gains successes but fails to find the grail that his fruitful mind seeks. We sense that even now as Chief Surgeon of the giant and far flung Veterans Administration there is more to this tale. We hope that there will be more stories. Perhaps not about practicing but instead about living. We will look forward to them as presented by this humorous, thoughtful, delightfully old-fashioned real doctor and surgeon.
   John Bergan, MD
   La Jolla
   May 2004

No comments about Too Young to Die.

No comments about Nathan Zuntz: His Life and Work in the Fields of High Altitude Physiology and Aviation Medicine.

No comments about Trikojus: A Scientist for Interesting Times.

No comments about My Fifty Years in Nursing: Give Us to Go Blithely.

No comments about A Bibliography Of Medical And Biomedical Biography.

No comments about Sir Hans Sloane & the Britain Museum (History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science.).