Health & Medicine

Dr. David Hilfiker is a physician who left a rural family practice in Minnesota to treat the urban poor. In his new book, "Not All of Us Are Saints," he describes his frustration both with the system that allows people to live in poverty, and with the patients who frequently flout his medical advice. Hilfiker's first book, "Healing the Wounds" won the "American Medical Writers Associatin" prize, and was named among the "Best Books of the Year" from the NYT Book Review.

David Whye is a poet who uses poetry to teach corporate executives and employees how to find satisfaction in the workplace. In his new book, "The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America," Whyte looks at the ways people can use their careers not only as a means to earning a living, but as a way of finding personal happiness. He has served as a consultant for such companies as AT&T and Kodak, and runs a small press in Seattle, Washington.

Film Critic Stephen Schiff reviews the Hitchcock-esque, psychological drama by director Richard Rush.

Dr. Mark Feinberg is the director of the Virology Research Laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital and the Associate Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research. He just returned from the 10th International Conference on AIDS in Japan. For the past ten years, Feinberg has been studying how the HIV virus causes AIDS; recently he has focused on people who have had the HIV virus for many years, but have not yet shown AIDS symptoms.

Hamilton's new novel is about a Midwestern farm family whose lives are changed irrevocably by one terrible incident. Her first book, "The Book of Ruth," won the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel.

Last week, a cholera epidemic broke out in Rwanda, and the country now has limited medical facilities and few physicians. Dr. John Sundin worked during May and June at the Red Cross hospital in Kigali, Rwanda. He'll talk about the cholera epidemic, and about his experiences working as the only surgeon in Kigali.

Writer Alexs Pate's first novel is called "Losing Absalom." It's a fictionalized tribute to his father that chronicles end of the title character's life as his family has gathered around his hospital bed. Writer John Willimas wrote, "Losing Absalom is a powerful yet sensitive embrace with black America today." Pate grew up in North Philadelphia and lives in Minneapolis.

Journalist Christopher Joyce has just written a book, "Earthly Goods," about searching for medicinal plants in rain forests. He'll talk about the history of seeking treatments in nature and the recent attempt of pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, and anthropologists, to preserve the rain forests while they search for cures to disease.

Authority on complementary cancer treatments Michael Lerner. His book is called "Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer" (The MIT Press).

Jazz musicians Red Rodney and Sonny Sharrock. They're both important jazz figures who recently died. We will rebroadcast previous interviews with both Rodney was a trumpeter and band leader. He rose through the big band ranks and played in Charlie Parker's quintet. He was known as one of jazz's best improvisers. And he was known for regaling journalists with his stories-- often of dubious veracity. (Rebroadcast of 6/15/1990)

Author and physician Abraham Verghese. An Indian raised in Ethopia, Abraham Verghese arrived in the United States in 1980 as a rookie doctor. Upon completing an internship in infectious diseases, Dr. Verghese accepted a position in the rural, Appalachian town of Johnson City, Tennessee. The year was 1985 and AIDS had begun to ravage large metropolitan areas. Within the year, Dr. Verghese was treating his first case of AIDS in this rural outpost.

Writer and teacher Reynolds Price A native of North Carolina, Price has written works known for their sense of place and off-beat characters. He's a prolific and a varied writer: he 's written short stories, poems, plays, and essays, and since the publication of his first novel, "A Long and Happy Life," in 1962, he's published more than two dozen books. In 1984 Price was diagnosed with spinal cancer, and became paralyzed from the waist down. Cancer, though, didn't slow his writing down.

Neurophysiologist William Calvin. He assisted in neurosurgery on a patient named Neil. Neil was to have a portion of his temporal lobe removed to cure his severe epilepsy. But the neurosurgeon, George Ojemann, had to know where to cut. A mistake could cost Neil part of his normal brain function. So, while Neil was awake on the operating table, Dr. Ojemann, probed and stimulated Neil's exposed brain, the whole time carrying on a conversation with the patient. The purpose was to create a detailed roadmap of Neil's brain functioning.

A remembrance of writer John Preston who died of AIDS. We play an excerpt from a 1992 interview.

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch. His new solo album is "Fred Hersch at Maybeck." Hersch recently revealed he is HIV positive and appears on several recordings to fund raise for the disease.

Dr. Ira Rutkow is a surgeon and the author of the new book, "Surgery: An Illustrated History," (Mosby). The book has 386 illustrations including documents, photographs, cartoons, drawings and paintings related to surgery, taken from museums throughout the world. Rutkow has also written a two-volume history of surgery in the U.S. and has written studies on Civil War surgery. He's also consulting editor for surgical history for the Archives of Surgery. Rutkow is founder and surgical director of The Hernia Center in Freehold, N.J.

Sheila Rothman author of "Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in America."

Tribute to Randy Shilts who died of AIDS. (Rebroadcast of 07/05/1990 and 04/23/1993)

Dr. Sherwin Nuland is a surgeon, and he teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale. In his new book, "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter," (Knopf), he writes that few of us have an understanding of the way people die because 80 percent of Americans die in the hospital, and, for the most part their deaths are concealed. Nuland's new book is an attempt to "demythologize" the process of dying and he presents death in its biological and clinical reality.

War surgeon Dr. Chris Giannou, who recently worked through the devastating civil war in the East African country of Burundi. In the ensuing ethnic and political conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi peoples there, at least two hundred thousand people were been killed, oftentimes not with guns, but with machete knives and spears. Giannou has spent over 12 years working in the world's hotspots: Somalia, Lebanon, Cambodia.