Trepan Books publishes original works of literature set in the world of medicine.

Books

The Neurasthenia Tapes

A. Robert Schell

What’s weakness? When is it a disease? What’s the cure? These questions lie at the heart of The Neurasthenia Tapes, a novel of contemporary medicine that charts the improbable research career of Alex Canden—a young doc with elite credentials, literary pretensions, and doubts about his profession. Thrust into the quest to understand and cure a rare and deadly variant of neurasthenia, the story of his rise and fall, an introspective trek from humdrum suburban ERs to the heights of the university-charity complex—by turns Kvetch-22, Remembrance of Cures Past, and The Immunity of Melancholy—exposes America’s medical zeitgeist, making us see how our culture fashions our ailments, how the media is our medicine, and how all too often the more cures change, the more we feel the same.

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Rubáiyát of Gomer-I-Am

Edited by Robert Schell

Paperback: $17
E-book: $8

Little is known about the Rubáiyát of Gomer-I-Am, a recently discovered trove of over 500 medically themed quatrains in the style of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The poems, cached in a battered metal box in the basement stacks of a major medical library, reveal glimpses of the life and thoughts of an anonymous self-described gomer—Gomer-I-Am—an aging, war-scarred, alcoholic academic. Questions abound. Are the poems memoir or fiction, private musings or intended for publication? Do we call Gomer-I-Am’s rubáiyát personal catharsis or healthcare critique, malicious burlesque or ironic inquiry, empathic illumination of the illness experience or a pretentious, tasteless prank? For many, the mere idea of poetry by or about gomers begs the question, Why bother? Peruse this volume and decide for yourself.

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