Does a Stressful Job Shorten Your Life?
“It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.”―Hans Selye, Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist, author of “The Stress of Life” Let’s see. Michael DeBakey died 2 months short of 100,Denton Cooley was 96,Francis Robicsek – 94,Domingo Liotta – 97,Viking Björk – 90,Alan Carpentier, alive at 89,Thomas Fogarty, alive at 88,Dwight Harken was 83,Norman Shumway 83,Vincent […]
If You Can’t Find Your Genre, Create One.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Oh, really? So when I say: Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap,” is that prose? PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Most clearly.MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!—Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670 In the previous post, I wrote about […]
By the River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept
By Paulo Coelho I read this passage some years ago. But recently, it brought to me an entirely different meaning. I am learning about the function of the human brain, and the phenomenon of memory fascinates me. Please read, and I will return to my crazy idea in the next post. “A scientist who studied […]
How We Care. The Epilogue.
The family care doesn’t start at birth. And doesn’t finish at death. Arthur Kleinman, from memory, modified. At a certain age, each of us suddenly finds out we had ancestors. I got interested in my heritage when I realized that the name of the village, where my father was born, is the same as our […]
The Plague
The choice seemed perfect. I read James Michener’s Hawaii while on vacations on Kauai and his Poland––knowing history of this country well. Reading Camus’ masterpiece now, when coronavirus is raging, lets me the current events with a different acuity. I don’t plan to relate the story in more detail. Enough to say, it’s about the […]
Forty-five years of cardiac surgery
In my gym, I meet the best people, and have the most interesting conversations, in the jacuzzi. It’s located in a corner of the large pool area and surrounded by a huge bay window extension. The sun is abundant, the water seems tropical, and, if I would drink, I would only ask for little drinks […]
Tomato horn worm and on becoming a gardener
A visit to the local independent bookstore, McIntyre’s Books is always a treat. Books there are invariably abundant, and the atmosphere is inviting for a quiet reading. During winter fireplace regularly provides the welcomed shelter and summery hot days can be tolerated better inside. Weekly readings by local and not-so-local authors add a spice to […]
Why the Nobel Prize in literature should not be awarded
The Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded to Polish writers many times. 1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz 1924 Władysław Stanisław Reymont 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer (born in Poland, wrote of Polish – Jewish cultural tradition, in Yiddish) 1980 Czesław Miłosz 1996 Wisława Szymborska. Therefore I should be, and I am, appreciative of […]
Reading of Anna Karenina and my thoughts thereafter
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Lev Tolstoy, beginning of Anna Karenina One of my biggest passions is reading. Ever since quitting medical practice, my schedule is more flexible, and I can allocate more time to it. I love to hold a real book in my hand, […]
