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
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
Section Two : Beginnings and Endings
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
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
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
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
Section Four: Coming to Terms
The Work of Talk / Marianne A. Paget
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
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
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.