Sayantani DasGupta

"My husband brings his work home. Had he been a butcher, it might have been a prime cut of steak; a mason, a block of limestone. The newspaper reporter brings home fingers covered in ink, and the fishmonger, the smell of the sea. But my husband is an oncologist, so he brings home the dead and dying."

The Doctor's Wife by Sayantani DasGupta
Hastings Center Report, Project Muse (2207)
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Stories of Illness and Healing "Stories of Illness and Healing" is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women's illness narratives - poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies - as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives.

Awards
Silver Medalist, Womens Issues Category, Independent Press Awards
Finalist, Womens Issues Category, ForeWORD Magazine Awards

Among the stories of princes, devata (deities) and bloodthirsty rakshash (demons), stories of women's lives and images emerge. Women and their goddesses bring to vivid life not only the nurturing Bengali motherland itself, but Uma, the daughter and potential wife; Parvati, the young bride and potential mother; Kali, the mother at her most fearsome, who can take life as well as create it; and Durga, the Divine Protectress and slayer of demons.

In these pages, DasGupta's trials and tribulations--and those of her patients--are vividly rendered. Whether it is a fourteen-year-old giving birth, a terrified AIDS patient, or elderly lovebirds with a less-than-ordinary sex problem, DasGupta illuminates the miracle of life and the struggle to sustain it. Yet she also shines a penetrating light on today's medical landscape--the militarism of medicine (where the patient is often the enemy), the gender wars, and the increasingly restrictive practice of managed care.

A remarkable account of medicine on the cusp of the twenty-first century, HER OWN MEDICINE is filled with wisdom and written with grace, lucid intellect, and a striking respect for life and the profession that heals it.

A Short Story

"There is an old man in the coconut tree
He catches bad children will not let them free
Like long white radishes, two teeth hang
His back’s like a drum that no one dare bang..."