Section One : The Experience of Illness. Introduction -- Musée des Beaux Arts / W.H. Auden -- Of Training / Michel Eyquem de Montaigne -- Innocents Abroad / Robert Lipsyte -- Applicants / Felicia Nimue Ackerman -- The Cast-Away / William Cowper -- Dejection : An Ode / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Doctors / Anne Sexton -- The Wall / Anne Sexton -- The Poet of Ignorance / Anne Sexton -- Cleaning / Darcy Wakefield -- In Kafka's House / Leonard Kriegel -- Homage to Isaac Bashevis Singer / Susan Fromberg Schaeffer -- Silent Snow, Secret Snow / Conrad Aiken -- A Sense of Threat / Jane Lazarre -- Hospital / Molly Holden -- Section Two : Beginnings and Endings -- Introduction -- Milk / Eileen Pollack -- Three Generations of Native American Women's Birth Experience / Joy Harjo -- Labors of Love / Ruth Nadelhaft -- I'm Born a Crow Indian / Fred W. Voget, assisted by Mary K. Mee -- The Sandbox / Edward Albee -- The Enduring Chill / Flannery O'Connor -- Rappaccini's Daughter / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Black Mountain, 1977 / Donald Antrim -- Let Us Have Medicos of Our Own Maturity / Anonymous Patient -- Hello, Hello Henry / Maxine Kumin -- The Last Words of Henry Manley / Maxine Kumin -- What Remains / Emma Donoghue -- A Summer Tragedy / Arna Bontemps -- Elegy / Dylan Thomas -- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night / Dylan Thomas -- And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Dylan Thomas -- A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London / Dylan Thomas -- The smile was / Dannie Abse -- Delivery / Toi Derricotte -- Homeless / Juliet S. Kono -- Son, After the Attempt / Juliet S. Kono -- The First Time / Juliet S. Kono -- Royally Pissed / Juliet S. Kono -- Nest / Juliet S. Kono -- The Struggle / Juliet S. Kono -- The Permission / Juliet S. Kono -- In a Rush / Juliet S. Kono -- The Way / Juliet S. Kono -- Section Three : Trauma and Recovery -- Introduction -- The Steel Windpipe / Mikhail Bulgakov -- This Red Oozing / Jeanne Bryner -- A Jury of Her Peers / Susan Glaspell -- Betrayal of "What's Right" / Jonathan Shay -- The Day My Father Tried to Kill Us / Pat Staten -- What I Saw from Where I Stood / Marisa Silver -- Mending / Sallie Bingham -- Torture / Jean Améry -- Section Four: Coming to Terms -- Introduction -- The Work of Talk / Marianne A. Paget -- Without / Donald Hall -- Orinda Upon Little Hector Philips / Katherine Philips -- the mother / Gwendolyn Brooks -- On Being Asked to Write a Poem in Memory of Anne Sexton / Maxine Kumin -- October, Yellowstone Park / Maxine Kumin -- Ponies Gathering in the Dark / Anita Endrezze -- Cathedral / Raymond Carver -- Ashes to Ashes to Ashes / Ruth Nadelhaft -- Wisteria / Leslie Nyman -- Premature Elegy (A Sequence of Poems) / Florence Elon -- Report from the Hospital / Wislawa Szymborska -- The Suicide's Room / Wislawa Szymborska -- In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself / Wislawa Szymborska -- Astonishing the Blind / Jack Hodgins -- People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk / Lorrie Moore -- Section Five: Healing Costs -- Introduction -- Admission, Children's Unit / Theodore Deppe -- The Eleventh / Henri Barbusse -- Baptism by Rotation / Mikhail Bulgakov -- What the Nurse Likes / Cortney Davis -- Excerpts from The Hospital / Jan de Hartog -- A Woman's War / Frank T. Vertosick, Jr. -- Mystery and Awe / Rachel Naomi Remen -- The Wound-Dresser / Walt Whitman -- A Night / Louisa May Alcott -- A Nurse's Story / Peter Baida -- A Separate Species : Relationships with the World and with Ourselves / Marion Deutsche Cohen -- Excerpt from Elegy for Iris / John Bayley -- Case History / Dannie Abse -- Ten Patients and Another / Raphael Campo -- The 10,000th AIDS Death in San Francisco / Raphael Campo -- On His Blindness / John Milton.