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A lively young wife turns a minor illness into a household drama, while her devoted husband guards a patient who enjoys the part.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
Seven-year-old Pashka is left overnight at a rural hospital, where promised treats give way to a world he cannot understand.
A gravely ill schoolmaster insists on attending the annual dinner that celebrates his pupils, determined to reject every hint of weakness.
A fever overtakes a young lieutenant on the train home, distorting every sound, face, and passing hour.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
An uninformed bride mistakes her wedding night for an attack, then becomes convinced a playful dog bite has doomed her honeymoon.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A dying woman on the sunny Riviera remembers the cold Norman marriage that made illness feel like her only path to escape.
A bedridden tavern keeper’s furious wife finds an outrageous way to make him useful.
At Easter, a carpenter notices a poor young woman whom the village has overlooked.
In a Greenwich Village artists' colony, a gravely ill young painter ties her fate to the last leaf on a neighboring vine.
15 stories
