Faculty Bibliography

The deathwatch that all physicians face at some point in their career, when nothing can be done but to wait for death, and play the role of observer, is discussed

A personal account of a man being accused of plagiarizing his own work is presented. His emotional response to the accusation is discussed

A description of how all too frequently doctors treat babies who have never been healthy and probably never will be is given. The effects these terminally ill babies have on people who work in the medical profession are described

This story also exemplifies Ms. [Lynne Sharon Schwartz]'s skill at using the small intricacies of daily life to tell stories about big subjects. Her first novel, ''Rough Strife,'' dealt in great detail with the progress of a marriage through the years. In one of the most moving stories in this new collection, she deals with maternal love by writing about a sick guinea pig. The narrator of this story is well aware of how life ranges from the grandiose to the minute, and of how the two can connect. She begins her story: ''Together with Carl I used to dream of changing the power structure and making the world a better place. Never that I could end up watching the ten o'clock news with a small rodent on my lap.'' She goes on to discuss her married life and her daughter's upbringing in terms of guinea pigs, and as she tells the story of each guinea pig, when it was bought, what it was like, how it died, she tells the story of loving her husband, losing him, loving her daughter. And so now her daughter is away and the guinea pig is sick, and the mother, without liking animals in general or this guinea pig in particular, struggles to keep him alive for her daughter. She is not sentimental about it. ''He was still just a fat rat as far as I was concerned, but a fat rat which fate had arranged I had to keep alive.'' By the end of this story, the title, ''What I Did for Love,'' seems only appropriate

A physician recounts experiences with acute parental guilt when a child is injured. As often as not, the doctor can do nothing to alleviate parent's tendency to blame themselves for even the most uncontrollable situation

Perri Klass reviews 'The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories,' by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

A doctor reacts to a case of a three-year-old boy who has leukemia and how it reminds her of her vulnerability as a human being and not as a 'superwoman' doctor untouched by medical disorders

Though doctor's feelings are supposed to be masked by professionalism, some times those feelings cannot be hidden. It is possible that patients do not like their doctors, and for doctors to not like their patients

I thought it was a funny article. I had no idea who it was from: I couldn't conjure any memory of hearing such an article discussed, of someone promising to put a copy in my mailbox. But several days later I got a call from my literary agent. My publisher had just received some letters accusing me of plagiarism, she said, sounding very upset. She read me the cover letter, and then the paragraph I was accused of copying, which was indeed almost word-for-word identical to a paragraph of my own in an article about medical ethics published in the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin. THE cover letter began, ''A relative of mine was graduated in '86 along with Perri Klass from the Harvard Medical School.'' The letter writer went on to claim that I made a habit of bragging about how I plagiarized, and concluded, ''I am happy to present you with an example of her plagiarization [ sic ] .'' The writer had enclosed a photocopy of a letter to the editor of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin, also unsigned, but typed on paper with a name printed across the top: R. Margaret McKay. Ms. McKay claimed that my article was ''a plagiarization [ sic ] from an obscure nursing magazine that was published in 1980.'' She continued, ''I've enclosed a xerox of a xerox I've saved from it and if I can find a copy of the magazine I'll send it in.'' After the letters had been sent to the people in publishing and to the people in my hospital, the next step was obvious: they were sent to the press. The press packet was made up of two letters (along with the usual photocopied ''originals''), and these touched for the first time on the issue of my medical competence. The first letter purports to be from a nurse at the hospital at which I work (typed badly, with many misspellings, on the appropriate stationery) while the second, sent as cover letter for the nurse's, is more professionally typed, and on the letterhead for another Harvard teaching hospital. The nurse's letter is to a columnist at The Boston Globe. She brings up the familiar accusations about my plagiarism, and adds some new ones - ''her fellow medical students avoided her because anyone's experiments that she had access to tended to go wrong.'' They she goes on: ''In working with Perri Klass I and other nurses have gotten the distinct impression that this person is so lacking in knowlege [ sic ] and skills that she presents a danger to the patients. We are currently documenting this to present it to our supervisor.'' The cover letter, addressed to an editor at Newsweek, claims to be ''leaking'' the nurse's letter to him. The writer (the one with the better typewriter and typing, though still somewhat dubious spelling) claims to be a classmate of mine, but admits to not being an intern at the famous hospital on the letterhead, writing '' [ I ] had access to their stationary [ sic ] and I'm hoping it will lend some credibility to this letter.'' The writer even tries to extract a larger moral from the catalogue of my misdeeds, hoping perhaps to interest a magazine in drawing the big conclusion: ''Maybe there's not so much a story in this as there is in a silent, couldn't-be-bothered group of people who were too busy looking out for themselves.'' AND after that, it stopped. No more mailings to editors, no more gift-wrapped boxes of excrement left for me. I had by this time realized that in fact my best (and only) defense lay in being public, in telling my own side of the story and even in writing my own side of the story. I had begun to talk about it with the people I work with, and had been rewarded with a tremendous amount of support and kindness, all of which made the hospital seem a much friendlier place to me again. I was also sent by the hospital authorities to discuss the case with a psychiatrist who specializes in situations of this kind and knows a great deal about them. He was able to describe back to me many of my own responses to being a target, to warn me against the kind of paranoia I had come close to developing about the people around me. He also advised me against any kind of public response, saying that the person writing the letters hungered above all for reaction, any kind of reaction. If I wrote an article about it, I might set the whole thing off again, he warned, whereas it looked as if my persecutor had either snapped back to a period of comparative sanity - or else maybe found a new victim

A discussion of how people in the medical profession often make lists of ways they would choose to die, if they had a choice, is presented. The top of the list often includes a quick, catastrophic heart attack and dying of old age