Tag: Summer
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Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain
Xi ChenRochester, New York, United States In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous spirit and Shakespearean prose, I followed the narrator from the piers of Nantucket into the Atlantic and waded through Captain Ahab’s quest for the legendary white…
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Partial eclipse of the heart
Perry DinardoCleveland Heights, Ohio, United States In early August 2017, the nation was buzzing about an upcoming total solar eclipse. I had been immersed in news about the eclipse for weeks, and decided it would be absolutely necessary for me to watch from the “Zone of Totality.” Within this zone, a diagonal path across the…
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Pellagra: A medical whodunit
Putzer J. HungSaint Louis, Missouri, United States “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?”– Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet Beginning in 1902, a strange epidemic struck the southern United States. Victims, often women and children of…