In issue 5.2, Ron Lands describes his first day on the wards as a medical student in “Welcome to the John.” Everyone has lottery fever, and pastries are paramount in Louise Marburg’s “Too Late to Play.” Claudia Monpere remembers the barbaric mental health treatments of the 1800s in three poems including “Dorothea Dix Speaks to the Massachusetts Legislature About Reforming Mental Health Treatment, 1843.”

Images are from Daniel de La Feuille’s Devises et Emblèmes Anciennes & Moderns (1699).