In his brief but distinguished life, Anton Chekhov was a doctor, a documentary essayist, an admired dramatist, and a humanitarian. He remains a nineteenth-century Russian literary giant whose prose continues to offer moral insight and to resonate with readers across the world.

Chekhov experienced no conflict between art and science or art and medicine. He believed that knowledge of one complemented the other. Chekhov brought medical knowledge and sensitivity to his creative writing--he had an intimate knowledge of the world of medicine and the skills of doctoring, and he utilized this information in his approach to his characters. His sensibility as a medical insider gave special poignancy to his physician characters. The doctors in his engaging tales demonstrate a wide spectrum of behavior, personality, and character. At their best, they demonstrate courage, altruism, and tenderness, qualities that lie at the heart of good medical practice. At their worst, they display insensitivity and incompetency.

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.

In The Talking Cure, physician-poet Jack Coulehan provides new poems plus a selection of work from six other books. His work explores the mysterious tension between tenderness and steadiness in medical practice plumbing into life's essential minutiae: the observed moment, the healing gesture, the internal response. These poems look beyond the difficulties of physical existence to see the worth and holiness of the individual. With directness, passion and even humor, they evoke an ethic of compassionate solidarity between patient and doctor, person and family, the individual and the community.

Jack Coulehan's The Talking Cure takes us on a wild, wonderful and wide ranging journey, sweeping us along on a current of poems: accomplished, fierce, gentle, intelligent and, above all, compassionate. Coulehan writes about the joys of medicine, of family, of love and faith, while not ignoring the frustrations of caring deeply for others, how sometimes even the most compassionate must struggle to squeeze a portion of the heart, allowing a few drops of compassion to escape (Lift Up Your Heart). The author writes most often in the voice of a physician, but also in the voice of patients, revealing their terrors and ravages, fears often shared by the narrator as he deftly balances the clinical and the humane in poetry that is rich with images, deeply personal, and often simply beautiful.
-Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time, www.cortneydavis.com

In The Talking Cure, distinguished physician and poet Jack Coulehan gathers thirty years of his work at the intersection of storytelling and healing. Here we encounter us all: a six-hundred pound man propped up in side-by-side hospital beds, a wife of a doctor turned by illness into patient herself, a man in the clinic of a local Starbucks becomes a woman, the absent fathers and distant mothers, each afflicted with the same need to be heard, and to be seen, in the miserable beauty of our shared human condition. We hear their heartbeats in this skilled poet's iambs and see their swollen legs in the full shapes of stanzas. Like Chekhov and Whitman, kindred spirits he evokes, in his every line Coulehan asks, How can I open up, give voice // turn these words into flesh? His answer is this unflinching, humane, and always attentively listening of poetry.
-Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only

Here in your hands is the best glimpse available into our world of medicine, its joys and sorrows, its discoveries and its mysteries. Here are poems that will stay with you, poems of courage, poems of value to you. Dr. Coulehan gives us the best words in the best order. You can't do better than that.
-Michael A. LaCombe, MD, MACP, FRCP (London), LHD (hon.); Poetry Editor, Annals of Internal Medicine

Jack Coulehan, the author of this remarkable collection, once wrote that physicians need both steadiness and tenderness to practice their trade. I would add, as do poets. Each poem in The Talking Cure brings a disarmingly honest and steadfast gaze to the joys and sorrows of the human condition, filtered through profound observations about doctors and patients, people and places. Simultaneously, each piece is suffused with a fierce compassion that acknowledges human vulnerability and finitude, while celebrating our resilience and indomitable spirit. These poems will inspire and uplift you, even as they break your heart.
-Johanna Shapiro, PhD. Director, Program in Medical Humanities & Arts, UCI School of Medicine

Jack Coulehan's latest collection of poems arises from the uncertainties, pain, and limitations of medical practice where moments of insight and joy are bursting with danger and music.

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In pitch-perfect poems that see clearly the humanity behind a patient's illness and actions, Coulehan investigates life's essential minutiae--the observed moment, the healing gesture, the internal response. In poems such as Forbidden Perfume and Referral from Dolores, he is not afraid to examine the often unspoken-about reality of care giving--the human odors of illness and neglect. And yet his poems are elegantly humane; they look beyond the difficult surface to see the worth, the holiness, of the individual person. My favorite poem in this new collection is the lovely, Darkness is Gathering Me. There is darkness in this collection--the Danger of the title--but most of all there is Music. The music in these poems is the sweet melody of compassion, of the way, when we are at our best, we care for and cherish one another.
--Cortney Davis, author of I Knew a Woman: The Experience of the Female Body (winner of the Center for the Book Non-fiction Award) and The Heart's Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing.

With courage, conviction, and an eye for the singular, Jack Coulehan brings us to the intersection of body and soul. His poems are thoughtful, inviting, and transporting.
--Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and editor of Bellevue Literary Review

Jack Coulehan's poems ache with understatement and quiet beauty--like the work of any true healer, through them we are touched at the very core of our beings, and thus we rediscover the redemptive power of our own empathetic engagement with one another. The plainest of mysteries abound here: a smoked ham packed in dry ice sent each Christmas by a grateful patient becomes a ghostly reminder of mortality when one year it never arrives; the five moons of Venus, confused with Jupiter's through a backyard telescope, are humbling reminders of the limitations of what we think we know. In the end, Coulehan's bemused prescriptions of music and magic, of the miraculous in the mundane, are all that we require for what ails us.
--Rafael Campo