The first section of What’s Normal? presents a wide-ranging collection of essays and articles written by renowned clinicians who address clinical, ethical, and social issues related to mental illness and disorders. The second section uses fiction, poetry, and drama to portray mental and behavioral abnormalities, sometimes from “inside” the perspective of the deviant and sometimes from the experiences of family, friends, and other engaged observers. Excerpts that examine the treatment of mental health, intelligence, and sexual conduct are cited from such literary works as Equus, Of Mice and Men, Like Water for Chocolate, and Sula.

Most cultures ostracize people who do not fit within their norms. They pressure abnormal people to change their appearance, fix what bothers other, or stay out of sight—a pressure Leslie Fiedler has named “The Tyranny of the Normal.” This anthology examines the experiences of those who live outside social norms for attractiveness, size, and shape; it also explores the reactions of “normal” people to those who seem grotesque. Among the questions raised are who decided what is normal and abnormal; who has the right or authority to decide what efforts, if any, should be made to normalize someone; and who should pay for it—be it plastic surgery or the manipulation of human genes.

Carol Donley & Martin Kohn believe that “physicians stand at a unique vantage point as observers of the human condition.” In Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories, the fourth volume in the Literature and Medicine Series, contributors such as Richard Selzer, Robert Coles, Perri Klass, and Jack Coulehan prove this assertion through their moving and enlightening prose.

What is it like to be a student nurse washing the feet of a dying patient? To be a newly graduated nurse, in charge of the Intensive Care Unit for the first time, who wonders if her mistake might have cost a life? Or to be an experienced nurse who, by her presence and care, holds a patient to this world? Poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis answers these questions by examining her own experiences and through them reveals a glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable. The Heart’s Truth offers the joys, frustrations, fears, and miraculous moments that nurses, new and experienced, face every day.

Stories of Illness and Healing is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women’s illness narratives—poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies—as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women’s lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine.

The stories in Chekhov’s Doctors are powerful portraits of doctors in their everyday lives, struggling with their own personal problems as well as trying to serve their patients. The fifth volume in the acclaimed Literature and Medicine Series, Chekhov’s Doctors will serve as a rich text for professional health care educators as well as for general readers.

Our Human Hearts is a nonfiction exploration of the meanings of the human heart as interpreted by two traditions: medical science, which has made possible dramatic cardiac surgery and sophisticated drug treatments, and the much older cultural traditions that view the heart as a repository for wisdom, courage, emotion, and the soul. Carter interlaces medical and linguistic information with the stories of four heart patients, each with different illnesses and different personal approaches to healing. Much has been written about the heart from a medical standpoint, but few experts have explored the human side of the heart by giving a voice to the patients.

Bodies and Barriers offers a collection of dramatic pieces of our time that provide an aesthetic perspective from which we view today’s vital health issues. With each play exploring a different medical crisis, the collection covers a range of issues common to a diverse population, irrespective of gender or race. Included are works examining how individuals confront the challenges posed by physical disability, aging, and terminal illness. These plays take as their subject the human form and its pathologies while providing a humanistic perspective from which to view men and women as they come to terms with a loss of physical and emotional well-being.

Over the past thirty years, rural health care in the United States has changed dramatically. The stereotypical white-haired doctor with his black bag of instruments and his predominantly white, small-town clientele has imploded: the global age has reached rural America. Independently owned clinics have given way to a massive system of hospitals; new technology now brings specialists right to the patient’s bedside; and an increasingly diverse clientele has sparked the need for doctors and nurses with an equally diverse assortment of skills.