Faculty Bibliography

Women are an increasing presence in American medicine, but in areas like surgery they are still a rarity. A discussion of women in medicine focuses on the specialties they are choosing and their styles of practice

Name the dread disease. Chicken pox, of course. There are other, more serious infections (bacterial meningitis, AIDS, trichinosis, cholera, leprosy), but chicken pox spreads wildly, far more easily than any of those. One kid with chicken pox sitting in a waiting room can infect every other vulnerable child there. One infected child in a hospital ward puts the whole ward at risk. One hospital worker who is exposed to chicken pox and then comes to work can close down an intensive-care unit. Chicken pox is the scourge of the pediatric ward; no other infection so regularly provokes such panic. Remember chicken pox? I had it when I was 6 years old. I had mumps too, though I missed out on measles and rubella (German measles), thanks to immunization. Now children are immunized against measles, mumps and rubella routinely at the age of 15 months, and we immunize them as well against diphtheria and whooping cough. Chicken pox is just about the only routine childhood illness left, the only major infectious disease that almost everybody gets in the first decade of life, and, although an effective new vaccine is now being tested, it is not yet generally available. In a way, chicken pox may be the child's introduction to illness. Sure, there are colds and ear infections, 24-hour bugs and upset stomachs, but chicken pox is a Disease with a capital D, a distinct entity with clear signs and symptoms. It has a classic rash, poetically described in medical textbooks as ''a dewdrop on a rose petal.'' Stay home from school, try not to scratch. You're told ''not to worry, it's only chicken pox - everybody gets better.'' SO YOU BROUGHT YOUR child with a rash to the emergency room, and you got shut up in the special isolation room, and eventually the child was examined by a doctor who had had chicken pox herself as a child and therefore had nothing to fear (the doctor outside, who hadn't, wouldn't go near her). And she tells you to give the kid plenty of liquids, treat the fever with acetaminophen (giving aspirin to a child with chicken pox is very dangerous; it can lead to an often-fatal swelling of the brain called Reye's syndrome). She talks about ways to reduce the itching: baking-soda baths, white gloves, antihistamines. But, she tells you, there isn't any specific treatment for chicken pox

Teenagers with cystic fibrosis fight off death with the tiny details of adolescent life. They want to be normal. With aggressive treatment, half of them live into their twenties

Perri Klass reviews 'The World of the Newborn,' by Daphne Maurer and Charles Maurer

A resident in pediatrics discusses the difficulties of performing painful medical procedures on children

DOCTOR ZAY. By [Elizabeth Stuart Phelps]. (Feminist Press, $8.95.) ''Doctor Zay,'' originally published in 1882, is a love story with rural Maine as its background. Waldo Yorke is a spoiled, wealthy young man from Boston, who meets with a severe accident while traveling along the ''wild Maine coast''; Dr. [ZAY] is the brilliant physician who attends his recovery. The story is told largely from the young man's point of view; he moves from shock and horror at the initial discovery that his doctor is a woman, to respect and fascination as he slowly recuperates and watches her in action, to passionate love

There are more serious infections, but chicken pox spreads more wildly and easily than most. The illness is described and arguments for and against a vaccine are considered

The anxieties faced by medical personnel transferring babies to hospitals by ambulance are described

The Maurers' theory about a newborn's consciousness is that the baby, dependent on perceptions of the world but with no knowledge of the world to correlate with them, lives largely in a looking-glass environment that is the inverse of our own. They offer, as an analogy, an observer on a flying horse, moving at close to the speed of light, who sees the world apparently moving past: ''Of course, you as an adult identify this moving world as composed of trees and fields. You remember that trees and fields usually are stationary and are too substantial to move, so you deduce that they are still stationary and that you yourself are moving. . . . But if you had never seen nor heard about trees and fields -if you were newly born - then you would not deduce this. Instead you would accept your direct observation, that the trees and fields are moving. . . . If you overtook another flying object, like a helicopter, you would think that the helicopter is moving slower than the trees and field; for since both of you would be moving in the same direction, you would take longer to pass the helicopter than you would take to pass the trees.'' This analogy leads us further and further into the mind of the newborn, whose developing nervous system picks up information from an unknown world; the Maurers posit an ''observer'' within the newborn's brain, an observer that constitutes the rudimentary ''awareness'' of the baby, for whom the speed of neurologic transmission is the limitation of velocity, analogous to the speed of light. This analogy is at times difficult to follow, but it leads the authors into complex and tantalizing constructions of the baby's sensorium. The newborn's world, the Maurers argue, is a world of synesthesia, of confusion of the senses. ''His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees odors, and feels them too. His world is a melee of pungent aromas - and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery.''