Charles L. Bardes, M.D., practices general internal medicine with special interests in primary and preventive care and served as associate dean of admissions at WCM for 21 years. A graduate of Princeton and Penn Medicine, he is the author of Diary of Our Fatal Illness, a prose-poem narrating the illness and death of an aged man, and Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia, a lyric essay exploring the cultural and mythological dimensions of a common disease construct. His essays, poems, and reflections have appeared in Agni, Academic Medicine, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Literary Imagination, The New England Journal of Medicine, Medical Education, Ploughshares, Raritan, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, and The New Republic.