Illness is not an event inside one body. It is a temporary dispersal — the self handed out for safekeeping to the people who hold its meaning when you cannot: family, nurses, the friend who answers the phone. I am a pediatrician; I sit on the side of the exam-room threshold where another person’s selfhood is being held. The patient is not less of a self when ill — the self is just, for a while, distributed. These works carry that out of the room — the heartbeat, the hand, the worn white coat — and past it, into the neighborhood and the children in it. The ones who hold us are part of the body that is healing.
