Granta 120: Medicine (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

… there is art to medicine as well as science.
- Hippocratic Oath

Clinicians have spent centuries perfecting the art of tending to broken bodies. What happens when their medicine succeeds? What happens when it fails us? Where do we turn for healing of the body and the mind?

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, fiction, memoir, poetry and photography, Granta explores the mind of the physician, the plight of the patient and the maladies and fears that bring us together.

Chris Adrian delivers a portrait of a doctor on the verge of a mental breakdown as he speaks to a lecture hall full of students. Alice Munro reflects on her adolescent brush with mortality--an encounter that temporarily fueled her with insomnia and violent fantasies. Gish Jen presents us with two fictional Chinese-American brothers determined to save their parents, who refuse to go into assisted living. Rose Tremain creates a 17th century surgeon called upon to perform a mastectomy on a patient who is half-awake. Linda H. Davis takes us through the travails of caring for her twenty-one-year-old autistic son in the face of her own struggle with lymphoma. Suzanne Rivecca explores the dynamic between a woman trying to secure funding for a struggling rehab clinic and a potential (and reluctant) benefactor. Terrence Holt pulls us into the chaotic mess of hospitals and human bodies when a code is announced. Ike Anya writes of the stigmatization of depression among Nigerian women. Semedzin Mehmedinovic recounts the alienation brought on by an early heart attack. And novelist M.J. Hyland, in an astonishingly candid essay, reveals to the world for the first time her on-going battle with multiple sclerosis.

We feature new poems by Kay Ryan, James Lasdun, Laura Kasischke, Ben Lerner, a prose poem by Rachel Shihor, and a never-before-published poem by the late Angela Carter.

And A.L. Kennedy introduces a collection of macabre medical photos by Brad Feuerhalm and asks the question: Why do some of us look, while some of us don't?

Here are the worldviews and the stories of both the surgeon, the shaman, and the patient.