Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts

Thursday, January 20, 2011

RIP: Reynolds Price (1933-2011)

North Carolina writer Reynolds Price died today, from a heart attack, just before his 77th birthday, according to a Duke University press release and the Charlotte Observer. Here's the birthday post we had for Price at DS,TU in 2007.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Why I love biographical dictionaries (#3)

For earlier installments in the series, see #1 and #2.

Again, the Australian Dictionary of Biography comes through with a winning disability-related snippet:
Although she dressed 'carelessly in skirts and sweaters', Dreyer had 'a passion for ornate drop earrings and exotic perfumes'. Humorous and warm hearted, she gave an annual party for 'Annabella', her wooden leg.
That would be from the entry on writer and journalist Marien Oulton Dreyer (1911-1980), who used a prosthetic leg from her childhood. She wrote a script for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1951 called "Story of a Lame Duck" which was "largely autobiographical," and another script in 1953 about tuberculosis recovery from the patient's perspective.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Elyn Saks wins a 2009 MacArthur "genius" grant

USC law professor Elyn Saks, author of the memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (which I posted about last year, here), has won one of this year's prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowships--the so-called "genius" grants--that "celebrate and support exceptional men and women of all ages and in all fields who dream, explore, take risks, invent, and build in new and unexpected ways in the interest of shaping a better future for us all."

Monday, January 05, 2009

January 6: Percivall Pott (1714-1788)

Text not available
Observations on the Nature and Consequences of Those Injuries to which the Head is Liable from External Violence To which are Added, Some Few General Remarks on Fractures and Dislocation By Percivall Pott

Doctors sometimes write about or from their own personal medical experiences, because, well, doctors have bodies too. Think Oliver Sacks' A Leg to Stand On, or Claudia Osborn's Over My Head, or Jill Bolte Taylor's recent A Stroke of Insight (she's a brain scientist, not a physician, but the idea is similar).

An early member of the club is Percivall Pott, an English surgeon. At age 42, he fell off a horse and sustained a serious broken leg. The standard of care for his kind of injury in the 1750s was amputation--which wasn't much care at all, because the surgery itself was quite likely to bring death by sepsis. Instead, his friend and mentor Edward Nourse ordered his wound cleaned, reduced, dressed, and splinted. Pott wrote during his convalescence. Upon recovery, he wrote up the successful treatment in Some Few Remarks Upon Fractures and Dislocations (1768). The book became a popular reference for surgeons in much of western Europe. "It is possible that but for his accident Pott would not have turned to authorship, and surgical literature would have been the poorer," commented Brown and Thornton (see below). Because bonesetting in Pott's day was considered something requiring only minimal skill, he cautions readers from the outset to beware bonesetting quacks, in terms not too far off from today's advice:
The desire of health and ease, like that of money, seems to put all understandings and all men upon a level; the avaritious are duped by every bubble, the lame and the unhealthy by every quack. Each party resigns his understanding, swallows greedily, and for a time believes implicitly the most groundless, ill-founded, and delusory promises, and nothing but loss and disappointment ever produces conviction. (Pott, 2)
Pott is also credited with being the first scientist to link cancer to environmental causes, when he found an association between exposure to soot and a specific cancer of the groin common to chimney sweeps. (The first signs of the cancer were called "soot-wart" by sweeps.) One of the earliest occupational safety laws in the UK was written in part as a response to Pott's discovery. Pott also wrote on spinal arthritis, head injuries, and hernias.

See also:
John R. Brown and John L. Thornton, "Percival Pott and the Chimney Sweepers' Cancer of the Scrotum," British Journal of Industrial Medicine 14(1)(January 1957): 68-70. Online here.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Remembering Herschey Lang (1912-1917)

[Image description: old, damaged photo of a little boy, Herschey Lang, wearing a hat and coat.]
Bella Cohen Spewack (1899?-1990) was a journalist, a publicist, and a writer for stage and screen, best known as the co-writer of the show Kiss Me Kate. But in 1922, while living in Berlin with her new husband, working as a news correspondent, Bella Spewack also wrote a fierce, funny, poignant memoir of her youth, titled Streets. The memoir wasn't published until after her death (it's available from Feminist Press); but because it was written and eventually published, we can remember Bella's little brother Herschey Lang, and have a glimpse of family life in the Lower East Side of the 1910s.

Herschey was born to Fanny and Hoosan Lang, both recent Jewish immigrants from Hungary, when Fanny's daughter Bella Cohen was 13. When he was born, his father brought home to the family's tiny apartment a yellow wood cradle; three cents worth of jelly beans were scattered under his mattress, to ensure a sweet life. Needlework pillowcases and tiny knitted caps were brought as gifts, by neighbors. Then, when he was six months old, Herschey got sick: a rash of sores erupted on his face, arms, and hands. The sores left scars. Hoosan Lang shouted at Fanny, "You wretch! You have brought me trouble! You have borne me a sickly child. And a son, God in heaven, a son!" (pp. 77-79) Hoosan left, while Fanny was pregnant with their second child, Daniel Lang.

Fanny moved herself and her children to a cheaper apartment, using a pushcart to transport their belongings. Bella took care of her little brothers in the streets, while their mother did sewing at home, and tended to their boarders. Herschey learned to walk on the corner of Houston and Goerck Streets, near the Third Street pier. Bella remembered the stares and insults:
Frequently women, and men too, would stop and unashamedly stare at the two in the carriage. Pregnant women looking at Herschey's disfigured face would stick their thumbs in their belts and immediately look away [a superstitious gesture to prevent ugly children].

One woman, whom I had seen frequently on the block, laughed outloud on seeing Hershey. The black salve that I had applied in the morning was still on his face. "Look at the little rat." For a moment, I felt as if the roaring in my ears and the pounding within me would never stop. Then I walked over to the woman and struck out. My outstretched hand landed on her neck.

That woman never again stopped near Herschey's carriage, but when she saw me, with or without him, she would cross to the other side of the street. As her revenge, she tried to spread the rumor that I was crazy, but the street chose not the believe her.
(102-103)
When the pier got a little too pungent in the summer heat, Bella took the little ones to a playground, where they could play in sand and take turns on the swings. She also included the boys in her dramatic productions with neighborhood teens: they played a stringed instrument during a scene from Romeo and Juliet, enacted on a tenement fire escape. Fanny and Bella got summer jobs working at a resort in the Catskills, and the boys came along, so they could eat better and get some fresh air. "I was fierce with desire that children play with Herschey," Bella recalled about that time, "for they shunned him and he loved them dearly." (p. 125) Soon, the management noticed how sickly Herschey was, and sent the whole group back to the city.

Herschey Lang died at age 5, after a long illness that included fevers and paralysis and a lot of lost weight at the end. "My mother was mad with the pain of her loss," explains Bella (p. 157). "So it fell to me to arrange for the burial." The last sentences of the memoir present a painful scene: "My mother and I, carrying Danny in my arms, attempted to follow the hearse on foot for we could afford no carriage. But the hearse moved swiftly. Herschey was light."

Herschey Lang didn't live long, but he was loved, dearly loved, by his mother and sister, right to the end. And he was never forgotten.

See also:

Lisa Muir, "Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack: The Ethnic Child Speaks to You Who Never Were There," College Literature (Winter 2002), online here.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

New Memoir: Anne Finger, "Elegy for a Disease"

While polio is a physical experience, it is also a social one…. Polio does not belong just to those of us who were infected by it, but to our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our partners and our children; to those who cared for us, to those who brutalized us (often not mutually exclusive categories); to those who saw us as palimpsests [tablets] on which to write their fear, their pity, their admiration, their empathy, their discomfort.


--Anne Finger, from the online version of the Smithsonian's exhibit "Whatever Happened to Polio?"


If you enjoyed Anne Finger's earlier book, Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth (Seal Press 1990), or her disability-themed novel Bone Truth (Coffeehouse Press 1994), you'll want to check out her new memoir, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin's Press 2006), just out.