Dear Dr. Pat, I am 58 years old and live in a rural area, about 100 miles from a regional hospital in the Southeast. I don’t want to identify the area any more than this. because our poor state gets enough bad attention as it is. We have only one gyn left here in the [...]

Born in London on the last night of the Blitz, Karen Alkalay-Gut has been living and writing out in the open ever since. She was reared in Rochester, NY where she received her PhD. from the University of Rochester. She has lived and worked in Israel since 1972 where she has a family and a [...]

Dear Dr. Pat, I am 54 years old and want to have surgery to correct the droopy skin of my upper eyelids and the puffy bags of my lower eyelids. People who know me well tell me that I look tired all the time even though I sleep well and am fortunately in good health. [...]

In my office I deal with terrorists every day. Their weaponry is words. They don’t torture me but daily commit cruel verbal attacks on others. “He won’t talk to me,” she complained. “I tell him what a lousy husband he is, how he expects me to do everything. Then he explodes and calls me a [...]

In The Private Patient (Knopf  2008,  $25.95) P.D. James, who began her celebrated and prolific mystery writing career in her forties, has delivered an excellent Gothic tangle of a mystery. Her protagonist, investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn, has  lived throughout her life and career with a brutally disfiguring facial scar. Shortly after her 47th birthday, she [...]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Last night, President Obama called all three of the women we last mentioned as potential Supreme Court Justices and told them he had chosen the very first on our list, 55-year-old New York judge Sonia Sotomayor — despite a whisper campaign that had [...]

so much depends
 upon a red wheel
barrow glazed with rain
water beside the white
chickens. So wrote the young aspiring poet William Carlos Williams in 1923. At his young age, how did he know? At his age, I was aspiring to be the world’s greatest poet or film star – or a cheerleader. Later, as a wife [...]

Holding fast to a well-deserved and much-derided reputation as a lover of show tunes, I want to share a few minutes of the raw emotion, over-the top-show-biz and pure joy embedded in this little piece of performance art at the Antwerp Central Train Station. Watch it and then we’ll talk. Okay, now that you’ve seen [...]

Nothing has changed in my consultation room since I began the practice of solo obstetrics and gynecology there in July, 1983. I was in my second year of private practice, I had a 4 day old son, and I was working away. The room is my favorite color, yellow (always with some red somewhere). Right [...]

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edna St. Vincent Millay published her first book in 1917 — the year she graduated Vassar College and moved to Greenwich Village, just as the United States entry into World War I began. For the next 40 years, Millay was an integral part of the Village scene, [...]