In 1692, three adolescent girls who lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony began acting strangely.  They had inexplicable episodes of screaming, twitching, babbling incoherently and even convulsing. When they were asked by the town elders to account for their unusual behavior, the frightened girls identified...

Webster? In the fall of 2009, Burnside Writers Collective published an article I wrote on health care reform called Who Would Jesus Heal? The piece was a lightning rod, drawing more comments than any other piece in the history of the website. This online community became a microcosm for the debate that...

Every January my clinic schedule fills up with patients who, in keeping with their New Year’s resolutions, want to lose weight, drink less alcohol, and stop smoking. In my first few years of practice, I felt obligated to give each of these patients a 20 minute lecture on their vice of choice, replete...

A few years ago I ran the medical clinic at a camp in the Pocono Mountains.  Local churches donated scholarship money, and the funds were used to bus kids from Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York City to the mountains for a week in the great outdoors. The summer was as much a learning experience for...

I recently drove from Los Angeles to Portland with my friend and her two small children.  We sang silly songs, ate snacks and read a stack of children’s books.  It was a fun adventure, until we were about 300 miles from home, and her son informed me that it was “taking too long.” “Are we there...

In 1883, Emma Lazarus, a young American woman from a wealthy Jewish family, wrote a sonnet called, “The New Colossus.” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is...

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, and by 1831 the first of five Native American tribes was uprooted from its homeland in Georgia and forced to walk 1,000 miles to a barren territory we now call Oklahoma.  Most of them walked the entire distance without shoes or moccasins...