Leonard Tushnet was a physician and writer. His writings covered Jewish history, medicine, and science fiction, often in combination. More coming as I get them scanned.

Stories

 

The Worm Shamir (pdf), Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec. 1968.

Gifts From the Universe (pdf) (Word), Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1968/The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eighteenth Series, ed. Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday, 1969, hc).

In the World of Magic (pdf) (Word), Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1974 (published after his death in November 1973).

 

Books

The Medicine Men

(1971) (St. Martin's and Consumer Education Research Group)

From the back cover of the CERG edition:

THE MEDICINE MEN is a well-documented and witty book which explodes the myth of quality medical care in the United States. Dr. Leonard Tushnet, a respected doctor of almost forty years' experience, here analyzes many of the recent “breakthroughs” in medical technology, diagnosis and treatment, and finds that they' have been dangerously overemphasized and not fully understood by many in the medical profession. THE MEDICINE MEN gives the layman an insider's view of both general practitioners and specialists-internists, obstetricians, psychiatrists, gynecologists and surgeons, among others-and some of their commonly used and often dangerous treatments. The author also casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of some of our most honored articles of medical faith: the annual check-up, laboratory ''tests," and medical "consultations.''

This is a book which pulls no punches. It is not an indictment of all doctors, but it does offer sound advice on how to tell a competent physician from a highly educated witch doctor. THE MEDICINE MEN is a book which could conceivably save your life, and is required reading before you keep your next appointment with your doctor!

Dr. Leonard Tushnet has recently retired from his New Jersey Medical practice after almost forty years of service. He is the author of numerous medical and historical articles, and has had more than sixty short stories published in the past ten years. Two of his previous books have dealt with the history of the Warsaw Ghetto.

THE MEDICINE MEN is his first full-length analysis of the profession to which he has devoted most of his life.

Cover and TOC

I: Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

II: The Visitation

III: The Name of the Rose

IV: The Sacred Precincts

V: History and Physical

VI: The Oracles

VII: A Commercial Note

VIII: Members of One Body

IX: The Pow-Wow

X: In The Medical Staff Lounge

XI: The Bubbling Cauldron

XII: Advice from an Infidel and Back

Note: These text files are raw OCR, with significant unreadable passages. The PDFs above, however, should be readable. Text: cover 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The Uses of Adversity: Studies of Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto

Warning for graphic content.
From the inside flap:

The spectral times of the Warsaw Ghetto have not gone unrecorded. The people impersonally placed in a vise and squeezed to death by slow turns has sent its long death wail into the nerve of the times. The Uses of Adversity casts an eye on a single macabre aspect of the Jews' prolonged struggle in their walled-in and doomed section of Warsaw—starvation--and on the strange and heroic action of the Ghetto doctors in the face of it.

 

In the worst times of the Ghetto, hundreds of men, women, and children dropped off daily from starvation. The hospitals were storehouses for the puffed and wasted bodies of the starved; in the streets moved wandering skeletons. The doctors had no food to give (they were themselves starving), and nothing but food would help. But if they were unable to cure, they were still doctors; if they had no medicine, their knowledge remained. They made use of the unexampled availability of starvation specimens to make an exhaustive and recise study of the effects of starvation on the human organism.

 

The doctors worked in the atmosphere of a charnel house: their instruments had to be smuggled across the Ghetto walls at the risk of life, and even then their equipment was extremely limited. Difficulties were made yet greater by the continual shifts in location enforced by the Nazis, and by the loss of the doctors as one by one they were sent off to the death camp at Treblinka or died of the condition they were studying. Those that continued, for the most part certain they would soon die, could not even be assured that their manuscript would survive. But they did not succumb to despair, and their work was a valuable and enduring contribution to medical science: adversity itself was made a steppingstone to scientific advance.

 

The inhumanity of the Nazis created a historical freak: the juxtaposition of mass starvation and scientific sophistication of the highest degree. The Uses of Adversity tells the story of one of the noblest responses to that inhumanity.

 

Cover and introductory matter

1: Life in the Ghetto

2: Famine in the Ghetto

3: The Smugglers

4: The Czysta Hospital

5: The Hunger Project

6: The Research

7: The Researchers

8: Evaluation

End matter

Note: These text files are raw OCR, with significant unreadable words. The PDFs above, however, should be readable. Text: cover, inside cover, acknowledgments, intro, contents, and illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 afterword, notes, bibliography, and index

 

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