Faculty Bibliography

Many physicians can examine a patient in detail, listen with care to heart and lungs and stomach, feel all pulses, look deep into the eyes and never see the person. The need to keep sight of a patient as a person is discussed

A more gentle but very wise essay is ''On Being Raised by a Daughter,'' which discusses the tremendously strong effect a daughter has on her mother, turning on its head the conventional one-way perception of mother as shaper, raiser and, often, damager. She writes: ''Among all the uncertainties I have experienced about myself as a mother, of one point I feel sure: that I am not today the woman I would have been had Anne not been born one September evening almost nineteen years ago. I cannot prove this hypothesis, there being no control in this experiment, no twenty-two-year-old [Nancy Mairs] that night who had a son instead, whose baby died, who had had a miscarriage, who had not been able to get pregnant at all, who never married and lives now in a small, well-appointed apartment on the Marina in San Francisco, walking her Burmese cats on leashes in Golden Gate Park.'' This is the author's voice at its best, quirky, direct and stocked with involving detail. THAT voice works well for her in what may be the most unusual and potentially difficult essay in the collection, ''On Touching by Accident,'' the story of an evening when the author attempted suicide, of her decision, her plans, her visit to a party. And then, as she is preparing to end her life, she has a mildly comic encounter with a young woman in a clown costume, and is left to wonder at the chance ways we cross one another's lives. The essay is both a genuinely moving description of her preparations and a provocative and idiosyncratic view of a small incident that might have touched off nothing in a less original mind

Fatigue, the concern that dominates an intern's life, is discussed. The perspective of one intern is examined

You have to accustom yourself to sightseeing at the child's pace, to pointing out every camel or elephant or horse or donkey or cow along the way, and also searching out animals in sculptures, temple carvings and cave paintings. And if you find yourself settling down in a little niche on the outside of the Taj Mahal to read aloud ''Madeline,'' well, probably you will always remember the beauty of the pietra dura stone inlay work that you stared at as you intoned, ''In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines.'' Animals, of course, are extremely important: There were monkeys on the roofs in New Delhi, and cobras and snake charmers in the streets. (''Must have snake!'' ''No, [Benjamin], must not have snake.'') In the sacred city of Kanchipuram there is even a temple elephant who, for a coin deposited in his trunk, will bless pilgrims by gently touching their heads. Benjamin was thrilled with the whole idea of paying a ''penny'' and getting a ''kiss'' from an elephant. On the night flight out of New Delhi, on the way back to Boston, Benjamin suddenly looked up and said, ''Must see elephant. Penny-kiss.Must see elephant!'' We looked up and down the aisles of the 747, but there were no temple elephants to gratify him, only flight attendants with their duty-free carts. ''Must see elephant!'' What could we do? We promised that we'd take him back to India some day

A pediatric doctor recounts a recent trip to New Delhi India, where ethnic identities and other medical clues were hidden from him by his failure to communicate culturally. The specters of poverty and disease, some of which are not seen in the US, are discussed

The trials and tribulations of a medical student are presented. On Match Day students find out where they will intern and the transition from the classroom to the hospital begins

Two days in the frenetic life of a medical school intern is presented. Lack of sleep, confusion about diagnoses and memorized facts, and an enormous workload all combine to make two days seem like an eternity

A personal account of a doctor's experiences on the first night she was on call at the hospital after graduating from medical school is given. The terror of feeling incompetent, the exhilaration of helping someone live and the exhaustion of working all night are some of the experiences described

Perri Klass reviews 'Plaintext: Essays,' by Nancy Mairs

A medical student discusses the concept of brain death in light of his observance of a brain dead infant. Most medical centers observe certain guidelines for defining brain death; these usually involve such criteria as the presence of a flat electroencephalogram