Faculty Bibliography

Before Yugoslavia fell apart, the Dalmatian coast was the center of a thriving tourist industry, visited by travelers of all income levels from both western and eastern Europe. During the recent war, some of the cities on the coast -- most famously Dubrovnik, but also Zadar -- suffered heavy shelling. The Croatian military is still a visible presence, and Bosnian refugees are still waiting in some Dalmatian towns for their next destinations, but much of the war damage has been repaired, and the country is eager, to the point, perhaps, of economic desperation, for the return of the tourists. We were making a slightly eccentric two-week trip in May, because Larry, my traveling companion, is a historian interested in the Venetian imperial adventure in Dalmatia -- between 1409 and 1797, when Napoleon abolished the Venetian Republic, Venice ruled this strip of land directly across the Adriatic. Our destinations, then, were chosen according to their importance in an empire exactly two centuries gone. Not surprisingly, the cities where the Venetian influence was strong are also the most beautiful and most interesting on the coast. What you do in Split is walk around the old town, enjoying tiny and peculiarly angled streets, and stopping as often as possible to sit at an outdoor table and have a drink. We started at Diocletian's Palace, an enormous third-century structure built on the four-quadrant plan of a Roman fort. Entering at a gate across from the harbor, you wander through the largely empty echoing vestibule and the basement chambers. Then you come out into the sun in the palace courtyard, the peristyle, grandly lined with columns, leading to the emperor's mausoleum. The varying historical tides of religion and commerce have made their inexorable changes to the emperor's grand design; he may have deified himself during his lifetime, but his mausoleum has been turned into a cathedral by the deeply Catholic Croats. The peristyle is occupied, inevitably, by an exceptionally pleasant outdoor cafe, the Kavana Luxor, where you can sip a drink and gaze at the black granite Egyptian sphinx for which it is named; the sphinx was already 1,500 years old when Diocletian put it there. It is a longer and more ambitious trip to go from Split to Zadar, but since Zadar was the principal city and administrative center of Venetian Dalmatia, it was on our agenda. We set out very early for a four-hour ride; the multiple bus lines, all operating out of the main bus station in Split, seem to reflect the heady free-market days of post-Communist competition. Zadar was badly damaged by shelling in 1991, and the town's historic sites are still being repaired. The many interesting churches include a closed-up Serbian Orthodox church, St. Elijah, externally undamaged but abandoned, a towering reminder of the cultural complexity that used to be Yugoslavia. The imposing Romanesque cathedral is dedicated to St. Anastasia, a Slav martyred in the fourth century, probably by order of the emperor Diocletian himself

Perri Klass comments on the Reach Out and Read program in Boston and the giving away of books to young patients by pediatricians

Most health insurance companies now insist that new mothers and their newborn babies leave the hospital within 24 hours after the birth. Klass, a pediatrician, argues why this stay is just too short for most cases

Many parents worry about their children too much. Too much worry can be a bad thing. Parents need to allow their children to grow up and be themselves

A short story is presented

A large body of medical knowledge exists that can inform the public policy debate as to whether the current needs and future life prospects of poor children could better be served in orphanages than by continuing safety net programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and Supplemental Social Security Income, which maintain children in families. This special article explores a century of pediatric and child psychiatry research covering five areas of potential biologic and social risk to infants and young children in orphanage care: (1) infectious morbidity, (2) nutrition and growth, (3) cognitive development, (4) socioaffective development, and (5) physical and sexual abuse. These data demonstrate that infants and young children are uniquely vulnerable to the medical and psychosocial hazards of institutional care, negative effects that cannot be reduced to a tolerable level even with massive expenditure. Scientific experience consistently shows that, in the short term, orphanage placement puts young children at increased risk of serious infectious illness and delayed language development. In the long term, institutionalization in early childhood increases the likelihood that impoverished children will grow into psychiatrically impaired and economically unproductive adults

This book walks an interesting line between medical thriller and novel of ideas; its plot twists combine ethical dilemmas out of the right-to-die controversy with crazed killers stalking hospital halls. The writer famous for her husband's death, the doctor who sees compassion in ending pain even when it means ending life, the president of the hospital with his corporate analysis of expenditure on the dying, the nurse who works among the dying patients these are the players. It exists, as a novel, in a fascinating border country where true-life medical drama, from-the-headlines controversy and good old-fashioned suspense all stake their claims, and the narrative tensions this creates are as palpable as the tensions of the novel's complex plot