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By Stephen Bergman | August 10, 2009
DATELINE: Tierra Tranquila, a house on a mountain above the Pacific in Costa Rica
LAST NIGHT we sat out under the equatorial stars and listened to the sounds of howler monkeys, birds, and cicadas. At 2,000 feet, there are no mosquitoes. This morning at dawn we watched three [...]
By Stephen Bergman | August 3, 2009
A COUPLE sits on a beach on a brilliant July day. They’ve just had a picnic lunch, and are in that hazy sweet space of watching the waves and the gulls, the passing sailboat, or, far out, the tanker. They feel close.
The woman, wanting to feel even more close, [...]
By Stephen Bergman | July 27, 2009
MEDICAL STUDENTS in their course on diagnosis are taught: “When you hear hoof beats outside the window don’t assume it’s a zebra.’’ This means that you should think of common diseases first, not exotic ones.
Decades ago when I was a medical student in Boston at one of [...]
By Stephen Bergman | July 20, 2009
LIKE THE arcane process of film developing in a darkroom tray, several Laws of the Novelist have appeared, and are offered as a guide to those so inclined.
Law Number One: Don’t Believe Teachers. The son of a dentist, I always wanted to be a writer. At college I worked [...]
Boston Globe
July 13, 2009
THE RECENT verdict of guilty in the “Clark Rockefeller’’ trial was an affirmation by a jury of his peers that he was not insane at the time of the crime. But the duel of prosecution and defense psychiatrists was at best a farce, at worst a travesty of the profession and the [...]
Boston Globe
July 6, 2009
John and I met in 1979 at a writer’s party, shortly after my first novel came out. My impression was clouded by nervous awe, but luckily it was summer and our conversation turned to golf, John’s passion, and my sport at our shared alma mater, Harvard. A week later I was [...]
Boston Globe
June 7, 2009
THE REASONS for the shortage of primary-care doctors have been clearly described: low pay, long hours, the crossword puzzle of insurance forms required to get paid – which leads to three administrative assistants for every doctor. But the issue is being framed using a classic tactic of the private insurance industry: in [...]
By Stephen Bergman | October 13, 2008
RECENTLY A Boston hospital was cited for “hours violations” by the Accreditation Committee for Graduate Medical Education (one of 227 violators this year), and was told it would jeopardize its accreditation as a surgery training program if it did not correct the problems – which it acknowledged [...]
By Stephen J. Bergman | August 5, 2007
SOON AFTER HMO/managed care came to Massachusetts in the late ’80s, I got a call from a patient I had admitted to the 28-day alcohol unit at the hospital. He said that he was being discharged after three days because that was all that the HMO [...]