The Best Medicine

An inspired anthology about physical and psychological illness, healing, and healers--featuring a brilliant array of classic and contemporary writers, from Anton Chekhov to Lorrie Moore.

This unique anthology gathers fictional tales of sickness and of healing, both physical and psychological, from a wide variety of times and perspectives. Some of these writers were themselves physicians, notably Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's story, taken from A Country Doctor's Notebook, draws on his early experience as a young doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story, from her collection Asylum Piece, gives us a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic. Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore are among the other writers of medical adventures that fill these pages. From Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" and William Carlos Williams's "The Paid Nurse" to Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp," O. Henry's "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," the stories gathered here are peopled by a colorful and varied cast of doctors, nurses, and patients.

Preface
 
THE DOCTOR’S EXPERIENCE
 
Anton Chekhov, “A Doctor’s Visit”
Samuel Warren, “The Forger”
Elizabeth Berridge, “The Hard and the Human”
Arthur Conan Doyle, “Sweethearts”
Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Embroidered Towel”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Body-Snatcher”
J. G. Ballard, “Minus One”
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”
 
CONSULTATIONS
 
W. W. Jacobs, “Back to Back”
Guy De Maupassant, “A Coup d’État”
Graham Greene, “Doctor Crombie”
Anna Kavan, “Airing a Grievance”
W. Somerset Maugham, “Lord Mountdrago”
Julian Maclaren-Ross, “I Had to Go Sick”
Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk”
 
DEALING WITH ILLNESS
 
Rudyard Kipling, “Swept And Garnished”
O. Henry, “Let Me Feel Your Pulse”
William Carlos Williams, “The Paid Nurse”
Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster”
Dorothy Parker, “Lady With a Lamp”
Robert A. Heinlein, “Life-Line”
Rhys Davies, “I Will Keep Her Company”
Alice Munro, “The Moons of Jupiter”