The School of Anecdotal Medicine
A baboon rescued from medical experimentation leads to a quandry for one of Darwin’s descendants. A public health officer falls in love with a Christian Scientist. A man whose wife has disappeared attends a support group for widowers. A locksmith has an ulterior motive for giving his all to a community cause. Again and again in these stories, the road to self-discovery is paved with contradiction and imposture.
In the realm of the short story, Jacob M. Appel is our great moral diagnostician: unfailingly clear-eyed and empathetic, alive to the humor and heartwrenching irony of our shortcomings and their pathological sequelae.
This edition reprints the eight stories included in The Magic Laundry (Snake Nation Press, 2014) and includes six additional previously uncollected stories.
Jacob M. Appel is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, where he is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry, Associate Director of the Academy for Medicine and the Humanities, and Medical Director of the Mental Health Clinic at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program. Jacob is the author of five literary novels, ten short story collections, two volumes of poems, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller, and a compendium of dilemmas in medical ethics. He is Vice President and Treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, co-chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s Committee on Psychiatry & Law, and a Councilor of the New York County Psychiatric Society and of the American Academy of Psychiatry & Law. More at: www.jacobmappel.com.