A mini-comics master's poetic musings on illness & the art of getting by The Hospital Suite is a landmark work by the celebrated cartoonist and small-press legend John Porcellino—an autobiographical collection detailing his struggles with illness in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997, John began to have severe stomach pain. He soon found out he needed emergency surgery to remove a benign tumor from his small intestine. In the wake of the surgery, he had numerous health complications that led to a flare-up of his preexisting tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Hospital Suite is Porcellino’s response to these experiences—simply told stories drawn in the honest, heart-wrenching style of his much-loved King-Cat mini-comics. His gift for spare yet eloquent candor makes The Hospital Suite an intimate portrayal of one person’s experiences that is also intensely relatable. Porcellino’s work is lauded for its universality and quiet, clear-eyed contemplation of everyday life. The Hospital Suite is a testimony to this subtle strength, making his struggles with the medical system and its consequences for his mental health accessible and engaging.

Poetic musings on illness and the art of getting by from a mini-comics master The Hospital Suite is a landmark work by the celebrated cartoonist and small-press legend John Porcellino—an autobiographical collection detailing his struggles with illness in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997, John began to have severe stomach pain. He soon found out he needed emergency surgery to remove a benign tumor from his small intestine. In the wake of the surgery, he had numerous health complications that led to a flare-up of his preexisting tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Hospital Suite is Porcellino's response to these experiences—simply told stories drawn in the honest, heart-wrenching style of his much-loved King-Cat mini-comics. His gift for spare yet eloquent candor makes The Hospital Suite an intimate portrayal of one person's experiences that is also intensely relatable. Porcellino's work is lauded for its universality and quiet, clear-eyed contemplation of everyday life. The Hospital Suite is a testimony to this subtle strength, making his struggles with the medical system and its consequences for his mental health accessible and engaging.

In CT Suite the doctor and anthropologist Barry F. Saunders provides an ethnographic account of how a particular diagnostic technology, the computed tomographic (CT) scanner, shapes social relations and intellectual activities in and beyond the CT suite, the unit within the diagnostic radiology department of a large teaching hospital where CT images are made and interpreted. Focusing on how expertise is performed and how CT images are made into diagnostic evidence, he concentrates not on the function of CT images for patients but on the function of the images for medical professionals going about their routines. Yet Saunders offers more than insider ethnography. He links diagnostic work to practices and conventions from outside medicine and from earlier historical moments. In dialogue with science and technology studies, he makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the visual cultures of medicine. Saunders’s analyses are informed by strands of cultural history and theory including art historical critiques of realist representation, Walter Benjamin’s concerns about violence in “mechanical reproduction,” and tropes of detective fiction such as intrigue, the case, and the culprit. Saunders analyzes the diagnostic “gaze” of medical personnel reading images at the viewbox, the two-dimensional images or slices of the human body rendered by the scanner, methods of archiving images, and the use of scans as pedagogical tools in clinical conferences. Bringing cloistered diagnostic practices into public view, he reveals the customs and the social and professional hierarchies that are formulated and negotiated around the weighty presence of the CT scanner. At the same time, by returning throughout to the nineteenth-century ideas of detection and scientific authority that inform contemporary medical diagnosis, Saunders highlights the specters of the past in what appears to be a preeminently modern machine.

The debut novel by the author of Rattlebone. “Told in a melody all its own, this story touches many lovely and unexpected notes.” —Elizabeth Strout, #1 New York Times bestselling author It is 1950 and October Brown is a twenty-three-year-old first-year teacher thanking her lucky stars that she found a room in the best boardinghouse for Negro women teachers in Wyandotte County, Kansas. During an affair with an unhappily married handyman, October becomes pregnant. With job in jeopardy and her reputation in tatters, October goes back to Ohio to be with her family: her older sister, Vergie, and her aunts who raised the sisters after their mother was killed by their father. After giving birth, she gives the child to Vergie and her husband to raise as their own, then returns to Kansas City to rebuild her life. But something is missing—and, apparently too late, October realizes what she has done . . . The Midwest, the flourishing of modern jazz, and the culture of segregation form a compelling historical backdrop for this timeless and universal tale of one person’s battle to understand and master her own desires, and to embrace the responsibilities and promise of mature adulthood. In October Suite, Clair “has skillfully brought lyricism and word-play to her first novel, a family saga filled with secrets, redemption, and rivalry, as two sisters try to reclaim bonds forged in early childhood tragedy” (Library Journal). “Maxine Clair deserves our admiration for this beautifully written and humane novel.” —The Washington Post “A beautifully imagined novel that pulses with all the colors and sounds of the lives we live.” —Marita Golden, author of The Wide Circumference of Love

Surgical services carry some of the highest risks and rewards of all healthcare specialties. They also present specific challenges. Those unfamiliar with the surgical suite’s inner workings may struggle to lead and manage this complex and often isolated department. The Healthcare Executive’s Guide to Navigating the Surgical Suite: A Roadmap to the OR and Perioperative Services provides experienced and novice healthcare leaders with the information, leadership structures, and practical strategies needed to successfully oversee both patient outcomes and balance sheets. This book covers contemporary market realities, business challenges, labor requirements, and clinical and operational complexities as it points leaders toward the most pressing issues in strategic surgical services leadership.

Doctor and social activist Paul Farmer shares a collection of charismatic short speeches that aims to inspire the next generation. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer’s vision in a single, accessible volume. A must-read for graduates, students, and everyone seeking to help bend the arc of history toward justice, To Repair the World: challenges readers to counter failures of imagination that keep billions of people without access to health care, safe drinking water, decent schools, and other basic human rights champions the power of partnership against global poverty, climate change, and other pressing problems today overturns common assumptions about health disparities around the globe by considering the large-scale social forces that determine who gets sick and who has access to health care discusses how hope, solidarity, faith, and hardbitten analysis have animated Farmer’s service to the poor in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Russia, and elsewhere leaves the reader with an uplifting vision: that with creativity, passion, teamwork, and determination, the next generations can make the world a safer and more humane place.

Medical examiners play an increasingly important role in society as unexpected and violent deaths increase, not only due to crime, but also due to new toxins in the environment, emerging diseases crossing from animals to humans, bizarre suicides, sadistic sexual practices, and other non-natural causes. John Miletich and Tia Lindstrom take us into the world of these medical detectives. Biological clues from bite marks and skin abnormalities to blood chemical levels and brain oxygenation are just some factors exposed in their quest for truth and justice. We learn the basics of death determination from rigor and livor mortis to signs of death by design, drug use, disease, suicide, and more. We also come to understand the tools of this work, from the Stryker's Saw to the grocer's scale, and tests that reveal factors from DNA evidence to toxins from insect bites. Each case begins with a biological mystery and ends with a conclusion that can provide loved ones with relief, or shock. Miletich, who trained at the Alberta Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, teams with Lindstrom to introduce readers to the medical examiner's role, including autopsy techniques and analysis. Twists and turns emerge as what was initially thought to be a murder proves to be suicide; what was suspected to be a natural death proves to be murder or environmental poisoning; or what was thought to be an accidental death proves to be something more sinister. This work includes appendices with guides to Medical Examiner organizations, seminars, and conventions.