The Best Medicine
My latest foray into short stories is reading “The Best Medicine: Stories of Healing”. * I’ve been disappointed by the short stories I’ve read in 2024; this compilation about “ . . . illness, healing, and healers” was no exception. These stories didn’t describe much healing. They all included sicknesses, doctors, or nurses but sometimes only peripherally. I was expecting something like the James Herriot stories or those of Oliver Sacks; stories that end with a cure. Instead, I found vagueness and inconclusive endings - far removed from those of Herriot.
In one story, a nurse tries to rescue an elderly couple who have been snowed in. She arrives too late. They have frozen to death; not much of a cure. The final story in the book made me angry. How could a story of only 22 pages be so damned tedious? I breathed a sigh of relief when I finished the story and the book.
Most of my underlining was from one story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.” This story by LLorrie Moore ends with the welcome cure of a newborn. Although her child was cured, the Mother was glad to escape the hospital and liked nothing about her experience with the medical establishment.
. . . look at all the things you have to do to protect a child, a hospital merely an intensification of life’s cruel obstacle course.
Groggy, on a morphine drip, still he [the newborn with cancer] can look at her [the Mother] when, maneuvering through all the vinyl wiring, she leans to hold him, and when she does, he begins to cry, but cry silently, without motion or noise. It is the crying of an old person; silent, beyond opinion, shattered. In someone so tiny, it is frightening and unnatural. She wants to pick up the Baby and run-run out of there, out of there . . . She would crawl up and lie beside him in the crib if she could. But, instead, because of this intricate wiring, she must lean and cuddle, sing to him, songs of peril and flight: “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place . . . there’s a better life for me and you.
Valerie is a saint, but her voice is the standard hospital saint voice: an infuriating, pharmaceutical calm. It says, Everything is normal here. Death is normal. Pain is normal. Nothing is abnormal. So there is nothing to get excited about.
Oh, the pleasures of a sign of relief, like the final moments of sex; has anyone ever properly sung the praises of sighs of relief? . . . “Is he going to be OK?’’ “The boy? The boy is going to be fine.”
Women Overboard! She takes the Baby back from the Husband, cups the Baby’s cheek in her hand, kisses his brow and then, quickly, his flowery mouth. The baby’s heart-she can hear it-drums with life. ‘For as long as I live, says the Mother. . . I never want to see any of these people again.
One of the better stories is “Life-Line” by Robert A. Heinlein, one of the greats of science fiction. He writes a statement that I think is relevant to our era of lies and conspiracy theories:
There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.
I bought this book because I was attracted to its cover and format. It is a book in the Everyman’s Pocket Classics, a collection of attractive, pocket-sized hardcover books of literary merit. The collection includes several short-story compilations. Yesterday I toured bookstores in St. Paul because it was Independent Booksellers Day. I almost bought Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest but held because of my bad experience with The Best Medicine.
Dalrymple, Theodore [ed.], The Best Medicine: Stories of Healing, Everyman’s Library, 2021
Stafford, Fiona [ed.], Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest, Everyman’s Library, 2010