5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exquisitely rendered tales of human disease, November 28, 2001
This review is from: The Language of Cells: Life as Seen Under the Microscope (Hardcover)
Spencer Nadler is a pathologist who would be a clinical physician. He is a doctor of medicine who would be a literary artist. He demonstrates in these exquisitely wrought pages a deep sense of identification and empathy with the very real human beings whose cells he sees in his microscope. He writes about intersecting with their lives in a style both concrete and moving so that we cannot help but also identify with the heart-wrenching experience of disease.
So there's an irony in the title and a kind of strange misdirection: Dr. Nadler's concentration is NOT on cellular life, but instead on the psychological, existential and spiritual aspects of people whose cells have gone bad.
He begins with the story of a 35-year-old woman who has breast cancer. She wants to see the cancerous cells in the microscope. Nadler, whose daily work is performing biopsies, especially surgical biopsies made on the fly as the patient is etherized upon a table, obliges, and thereby begins a relationship with her and her illness that goes well beyond what can be experienced through the lenses of his "research-quality German microscope made by Zeiss." She sees landscapes and metaphors in the dead and dying cells, and Nadler is once again reminded of the human experience of disease.
Next is the chapter entitled simply "Fat" about a woman suffering from morbid obesity. She undergoes the Rouxen-Y gastric bypass, a gastrointestinal reconstruction surgery that miniaturizing her stomach from a capacity of 1,700 milliliters to 35 milliliters. (I have a question not answered in the text: why did her stomach have to be SO small? Couldn't they have left her with say, two or three hundred milliliters?) The procedure works and she goes from over 360 pounds to 180, but she cannot eat more than a few ounces of food at any one setting and she must--as Nadler so beautifully phrases it on page 39-swallow only "bonsaied boluses" and take "great care to chew them to a flow."
"Fat" is quite frankly one of the best medical essays I have ever read. But I am not alone in admiring the artistry of Nadler's carefully constructed prose. Two of the essays in this book, "Brain Cell Memories" and "An Old Soldier," the first about brain tumors, and the second about a 75-year-old man who has been a paraplegic for 55 years, are included in, respectively, The Best American Essays, 2001 and The Best American Essays, 1999. I was particularly impressed with "An Old Soldier," in which Nadler's clear, stark prose reveals the courage, strength and sheer cussed determination it takes for WWII vet Sam Patterson to live when "His lower trunk and limbs, his bowels, bladder, and genitals, are permanently incommunicado, shutting him off from the rest of his body like a demented mind." (p. 150)
The other chapters are "Heart Rhythms," which is essentially a heroic portrait of conductor Mehli Mehta; "Early Alzheimer's: A View from Within" which features AD-sufferer Morris Friedell who "can crystalize the life that remains and devise ways to enhance it" (for example, he takes notes and crosses off the tasks and experiences as they are lived); and "The Burden of Sickle Cells" about a boy that Nadler befriends who has the sickle cell disease.
The last chapter in the book is an appreciation of hospice work and grief counseling with a focus on Nadler's friend, Brad Deford, a chaplain to the dying. Nadler follows him on his rounds and experiences first hand how comforting it can be to have someone help with the emotional and spiritual preparations. Nadler refers to one old couple, each facing eminent death, as having become, "in their married years together...two nuclei in a single cell." His final words before the Epilogue are: "How awesome is this cellular ride, so steeped in mysterious efficiency. But it is the human dying, so urgent and inevitable, that is graven unto me."
As can be seen, Nadler is a very fine prose stylist, and his book is to be compared favorably with the best works written by practicing doctors from what I might call "the medical tale genre." Some recent examples include Jerome Groopman's Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine (2000) and of course the works of Oliver Sacks, e.g., An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (1995) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other clinical tales (1987).
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry in Medicine, July 26, 2008
7/25/08
I have just finishd reading The Language of Cells, and am putting the book aside with sadness that this glimpse in the thoughts of a compassionate pathologist has come to an end. I lived with this doctor for the last few days and with his patients. Spencer Nadler uses the language of a poet and through the pages flows his compassion and human understanding of the interrelatedness of the smallest of cells to the complex body of man. There is much the layman can learn from reading this book, how these cell structures support life or herald death. The book begins with a patient viewing her cancer cells on a screen, and she describes them as a painter would a most mysterious landscape. A while later we meet Mehli Mehta, and Dr. Nadler describes the concert this ninety-two year old suffering from heart disease conducts, a micro chip implanted in his chest jolts his heart elctronically when his pulse rate races away from him. In these paragraphs I learned how the stress on the heart of conducting a strenuous symphonic piece, or running a mile, varies physically from the stress created by anguish or sorrow. Though in both scenarios the heart rate may go up to the same unhealthy level, the physical footprint on the heart would look different. There is a remedy for stress. Let me quote Nadler: "If my mind's stress has my heart racing and pulse waves pound my body's shores, I close my eyes and deepen my breath. Transferring the rhythm of my heartbeat into a drumbeat, I let the rhythm of my music begin..." In these words speaks a poet, not a doctor-writer.
Nadler is equally eloquent when discussing Sickle Cell Anemia, Alzheimers, Leukemia, Paraplegia and in the last chapter he discusses dying and the acceptance of death by the patient.
This book should be read by all who have an ill spouse, child or are ill themselves. It should be read by doctors and caregivers to show over again the great positive influence a kind and understanding doctor will have, so important in our increasingly robotic world.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Human Stories Behind the Cells, November 7, 2001
This review is from: The Language of Cells: Life as Seen Under the Microscope (Hardcover)
Although I've read most of Spencer Nadler's personal essays in various literary journals along the way, reading The Language of Cells in its entirety has been a wonderful experience. Dr. Nadler gives cells an emotional life,a human side in the world of the layman and fuses emotions with the stark reality of the world of medicine. Bravo!!
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