Richard Selzer's book, "The Doctor Stories"

This is an exquisite book of short stories. I can hardly tell you how much I wish everyone would read them. I love each one more than the last, and more than the last time I read them. I love the "Chatterbox" story very much. Mystical healing at its best. And the story called "Impostor" is very dark, and strangely Chekhovian. They are just superbly crafted, and really deeply satisfying.
"Imagine a Woman" may be my favorite. Everyone I know is now edgy and frightened about the future. No one in private practice feels safe, that they can stay here and raise their children, and keep paying their mortgages and their office staff. As in so many other parts of our society and economy, the costs are rising, and the pay is decreasing. Truly, all the parts of the jigsaw puzzle affect every other part. In the story "Imagine a woman" I felt like that woman going to a lovely town in the French Alps to die. Tuning oneself to smaller and smaller pleasures, and the kindness of strangers. (A cloud of bees on a summer afternoon, in a puddle of sunshine; and one exquisitely ripe peach). But also, in the story is the inherent care with which the people who live in the town, and the people who run the hotel, take care of the "guest": and perhaps hundreds of years of tradition of taking care of tubercular patients dying young--- sent to the mountains for the "clean air". A hundred tiny mercies. Infinite tact, discernment, discretion. And a recognition of the need for privacy. People working in hospitals could learn a lot from the hoteliers in the story.
The story "Angel tuning a lute" makes me cry. It imagines the aged father of a boy, a well-known Renaissance painter himself, in a monastery painting; when they bring the body of his son, who has been fatally bitten by a snake. The father immediately begins to paint the body of his son as the angel tuning the lute, on the east wall of the chapter house, using everything in him, all his art, all his skill, all his love, to put the frescoe on the wall, racing against time as the body begins to decompose in the summer heat. Part of the story is his teaching his apprentice about the art of mixing and applying paint. The place is the lovely Benedictine monastery in Tuscany.
The story "Imelda" sends chills through me. It is a story of a plastic surgeon, of great skill but emotionally distant, doing missionary work in Honduras, and encountering a young girl with a cleft palate. The sensitivity with which the story is told, both of the physician and the patient, are marvelous. It is unforgettable, and carries something indelible about surgery, and how surgeons embody their caring in their work.
"Whither thou Goest" is about a wife of a man who was killed suddenly and violently, who has been persuaded to give her consent that his organs should be harvested. She feels undone, as though he has not completely died, and she must hear the heart beating once more. Improbable as it is, it is so healing, how this comes about. It is quite tender and sensitive, how her story makes me feel.
It is hard to imagine that these stories are as perfect as they are. I promise you, if you read this book, you will be glad you did, and they will actually expand your awareness and feelings about being human.
For a writer-physician to somehow get the stories to incarnate what he knows about the human condition, and so that the physical condition is absolutely the core important part of the story, is what makes these stories so jewel-like to me. But also, there is the way he moves completely into the people he is describing, so that his sensitivity is almost like film as a medium. As clear as water; invisible, limpid. Beautiful!