Word: patiently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steel and Couch urge more open, self-critical discussions of medical mishaps by physicians and hospital staffs. Says Couch: "If you hear about some mistake, you certainly are less apt to repeat it. It's a cheap way to gain experience." The teams also recommend that doctors keep patients and families fully informed throughout the hospital stay. "Doctors often underestimate a patient's intelligence," notes Couch, "as well as the family's willingness to be cooperative...
Hypotensive Anesthesia. By depressing a patient's blood pressure to very low levels, anesthesiologists can lessen the amount of blood lost and give the surgeon an almost clear field in which to work. This is particularly useful in surgery on vessels that carry blood to the brain and in orthopedic operations like hip implants. The anesthesiologist anesthetizes the patient, then infuses a drug, usually nitroprusside, to dilate the blood vessels. This causes the pressure of blood against the vessel walls to drop from a normal reading of, say, 120/80 to as low as 65/50. The anesthesiologist must be careful...
...poem and its prose companion, it then turns out, have been given to Freud ,by Lisa Erdman, their author and his patient. She is suffering from i shortness of breath and debilitating pain in her left breast and left ovary. Conventional medical treatment circa 1919 has failed to cure her. Perhaps Freud's newfangled methods will help...
...story of Lisa's psychoanalysis is told by Freud himself. Thomas' imitation of a Freudian case history is uncannily accurate and convincing. It has the same whodunit intensity of the originals, the same bristling of symbols, the same gentle prodding to make the patient reveal more than she wants to know. Though Lisa resists him at many turns, Freud traces her problem back to a scene she accidentally stumbled across in childhood: a menage a trois involving her uncle, her mother and her aunt. Lisa does not accept her analyst's conclusion that she is a homosexual...
Thomas' conclusion is audacious, yet it seems exactly right for all that has gone before. Given the many mysteries in Lisa's life, the last one is almost commonplace. The White Hotel has its flaws. The break between Lisa the patient and Lisa the victim is too abrupt; she seems transformed less by analysis than by the demands of her author's design. But this novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze as well as inform, that an imaginative leap can sometimes take flight. Thomas' talent almost matches his worthwhile ambition: to fuse the dreams...