Granta 120―Medicine

? there is art to medicine as well as science.
- Hippocratic Oath

Clinicians have spent centuries perfecting the art of tending to broken bodies. What happens when their medicine succeeds? What happens when it fails us? Where do we turn for healing of the body and the mind?

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, fiction, memoir, poetry and photography, Granta explores the mind of the physician, the plight of the patient and the maladies and fears that bring us together. From a young man struggling to regain his mental health, to a writer witnessing the surrender of her body to MS; from the dubiously labeled chalky horse-pills of faceless pharmaceutical conglomerates, to the hot-toddy that was Grandmother’s sworn remedy for everything from a bruised knee to a broken heart ? here are the worldviews and the stories of both the surgeon, the shaman, and the patient.

This collection shows that sometimes the best medicine is a story itself.

John Freeman’s criticism has appeared in more than two hundred newspapers around the world, including The Guardian, The Independent, The Times (UK), and The Wall Street Journal. Between 2006 and 2008, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. His first book, THE TYRANNY OF EMAIL, was published in 2009. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Zyzzyva.