Madeline, smallest and naughtiest of the twelve little charges of Miss Clavel, wakes up one night with an attack of appendicitis.

When the reindeer get bad colds, Santa Claus wonders who will be able to pull his sleigh on Christmas Eve.

When Rudie's sitter gets the flu, he uses her recipe to make her a batch of special chicken soup, including the secret recipe of stories from the heart.

When Bear is too sick to play, his animal friends go to his cave to make him soup and tea and keep him company.

Jessi is caught between two brothers as the three navigate family, loss, and love over the course of her seventeenth and eighteenth summers.

Imagines the life story of Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," describing the simple life she led on a remote Maine farm, her complicated relationship with her family, and the illness that incapacitated her.

Llama Llama's mother takes good care of him when he has to stay home from school because he is sick, but when Mama Llama begins to feel sick, too, Llama Llama knows how to take care of her.

"Seventeen-year-old Rose Levenson must decide whether or not she wants to take the test to find out if she has Huntington's disease, the degenerative disease that is slowly killing her mother"--

When Sam has a cough, Mrs. Bear tends to him all through the cold night.

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth? This...