On Doctoring; New, Revised and Expanded Third Edition

by Richard Reynolds; John Stone

• ISBN13: 9780743201537
• ISBN10: 0743201531
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-07
• Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER

Summary

Few subjects hold more universal appeal than that of medicine, and surely few books have evoked medicine's drama and magic more powerfully thanOn Doctoring.In its many forms, from age-old ritual to the cutting edge of modern science, medicine concerns us all. It is a human profession, practiced by people who have dedicated their lives not only to science but also to humanity. In the words of the great physician-writer Sir William Osler, "The physician needs a clear head and a kind heart; his work is arduous and complex, requiring the exercise of the very highest faculties of the mind, while constantly appealing to the emotions and higher feelings." It is the humanity in medicine that has inspired the pens of countless writers, and that has now been captured in this remarkable anthology of medical literature.This newly expanded edition ofOn Doctoringis an extraordinary collection of stories, poems, and essays written by physicians and non-physicians alike -- works that eloquently record what it is like to be sick, to be cured, to lose, or to triumph. Drawing on the full spectrum of human emotions, the editors have included selections from such important and diverse writers as Anton Chekhov, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, John Donne, Robert Coles, Pablo Neruda, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Abraham Verghese. Among the new authors included in this edition are Rainer Maria Rilke, Lisel Mueller, and May Sarton.In this era of managed healthcare, when medicine is becoming more institutionalized and impersonal, this book recaptures the breadth and the wonder of the medical profession. Presenting the issues, concerns, and challenges facing doctors and patients alike,On Doctoringis at once illuminating and provocative, a compelling record of the human spirit.

Table of Contents

Introduction	13	(6)
It Is Still a Privilege to Be a Doctor	19	(3)
Carola Eisenberg
Death, Be Not Proud	22	(2)
John Donne
This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable	24	(1)
John Keats
The Stethoscope Song, A Professional Ballad	25	(2)
Oliver Wendell Holmes
There's Been a Death	27	(1)
Emily Dickinson
Surgeons Must Be Very Careful	28	(1)
I Heard a Fly Buzz	28	(1)
``Hope'' Is the Thing with Feathers	29	(1)
Tell All the Truth	29	(1)
Because I Could Not Stop For Death	30	(2)
Aphorisms	32	(4)
Sir William Osler
Misery	36	(6)
Anton Chekhov
In Flanders Fields	42	(1)
John McCrae
``Out, Out---''	43	(2)
Robert Frost
Excerpt from The Summing Up	45	(6)
W. Somerset Maugham
Going Blind	51	(1)
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Practice	52	(6)
William Carlos Williams
The Artist	58	(1)
Between Walls	58	(1)
Le Medecin Malgre Lui	59	(1)
The Birth	60	(1)
The Last Words of My English Grandmother	61	(1)
The Girl with a Pimply Face	62	(11)
The Use of Force	73	(3)
Complaint	76	(1)
The Watch	77	(1)
Frances Cornford
The Steel Windpipe	78	(8)
Mikhail Bulgakov
Baptism by Rotation	86	(9)
The Old Gray Couple (I)	95	(1)
Archibald MacLeish
The Old Gray Couple (II)	95	(2)
The Immortals	97	(5)
Jorge Luis Borges
Indian Camp	102	(3)
Ernest Hemingway
Hills Like White Elephants	105	(5)
A Summer Tragedy	110	(9)
Arna Bontemps
My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience	119	(2)
Zora Neale Hurston
Larynx	121	(3)
Pablo Neruda
Musee des Beaux Arts	124	(2)
W. H. Auden
The Art of Healing	126	(2)
Stop All The Clocks	128	(1)
Give Me a Doctor	129	(1)
A Worn Path	130	(8)
Eudora Welty
Sheep	138	(1)
Josephine Miles
Conception	138	(2)
The Tides	140	(1)
May Sarton
Wanting to Die	141	(1)
The Ender, the Beginner	141	(2)
Glaucoma	143	(2)
Edward Lowbury
House Calls	145	(6)
Lewis Thomas
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night	151	(1)
Dylan Thomas
Next Day	152	(2)
Randall Jarrell
The X-Ray Waiting Room in the Hospital	154	(1)
Washing Your Feet	155	(2)
John Ciardi
The Bean Eaters	157	(1)
Gwendolyn Brooks
Excerpt From Coming into the End Zone	158	(8)
Doris Grumbach
Doctor, Talk to Me	166	(7)
Anatole Broyard
Faith Healing	173	(2)
Philip Larkin
Fortitude	175	(16)
Kurt Vonnegut
A Man Told Me the Story of His Life	191	(2)
Grace Paley
X-Ray	193	(1)
Dannie Abse
Case History	194	(1)
Carnal Knowledge	194	(3)
In the Theatre	197	(2)
Diabetes	199	(3)
James Dickey
The Cancer Match	202	(2)
Talking to Grief	204	(1)
Dennise Levertov
Death Psalm: O Lord of Mysteries	205	(2)
Monet Refuses the Operation	207	(2)
Lisel Mueller
Men at Forty	209	(2)
Donald Justice
A Deathplace	211	(2)
L. E. Sissman
Mercy	213	(4)
Richard Selzer
Imelda	217	(12)
The Exact Location of the Soul	229	(5)
The Last Decision	234	(1)
Maya Angelou
Excerpt from Her Long Illness	235	(1)
Donald Hall
Children Imagining a Hospital	236	(1)
U. A. Fanthorpe
The Doctor	237	(2)
A Day in the Life of an Internist	239	(9)
Richard C. Reynolds
Excerpt from the Call of Stories	248	(3)
Robert Coles
Medical Ethics and Living a Life	251	(8)
Little Elegy: For a Child Who Skipped Rope	259	(1)
X. J. Kennedy
Going	260	(1)
Miller Williams
A Day in the Death	261	(1)
One More Time	262	(2)
Patricia Goedicke
Warning	264	(2)
Jenny Joseph
The Five Stages of Grief	266	(2)
Linda Pastan
Notes From The Delivery Room	268	(1)
Remission	268	(2)
The Tenth Circle	270	(1)
Paul Zimmer
The Explanation	271	(1)
The House Officer's Changing World	272	(5)
Joseph Hardison
University Hospital, Boston	277	(1)
Mary Oliver
The Black Snake	278	(1)
Beaver Moon-The Suicide of a Friend	279	(2)
Gaudeamus Igitur	281	(4)
John Stone
Talking to the Family	285	(1)
The lost Baby poem	286	(1)
Lucille Clifton
Poem to my uterus	287	(1)
Don't Touch the Heart	288	(14)
Lawrence K. Altman
What the Doctor Said	302	(1)
Raymond Carver
My Death	303	(1)
Errand	304	(10)
The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart	314	(2)
Margaret Atwood
Everything Is Going to Be All Right	316	(1)
Derek Mahon
There Is No Such Thing As the Moment of Death	317	(2)
Marilyn Krysl
35/10	319	(1)
Sharon Olds
Miscarriage	320	(1)
The Knitted Glove	321	(1)
Jack Coulehan
Good News	322	(1)
Medicine	323	(2)
Alice Walker
Mistakes	325	(12)
David Hilfiker
The Dawn of Wonder	337	(6)
Melvin Konner
Otherwise	343	(1)
Jane Kenyon
Let Evening Come	344	(1)
Let's Talk About It	345	(2)
David Rinaldi
What Hell Is	347	(2)
Heather McHugh
Laundry	349	(5)
Susan Onthank Mates
Touching	354	(4)
David Hellerstein
Duty	358	(2)
David L. Schiedermayer
Excerpt from My Own Country	360	(8)
Abraham Verghese
Invasions	368	(5)
Perri Klass
Hospital Sketchbook: Life on the Ward Through an Intern's Eyes	373	(9)
Elspeth Cameron Ritchie
Lullaby	382	(1)
Jon Mukand
First Payment	383	(2)
We Are Nighttime Travelers	385	(13)
Ethan Canin
El Curandero	398	(2)
Rafael Campo
What the Body Told	400	(1)
The Shot	401	(1)
Gregory Edwards
Excerpt from As I Remember Him	402	(1)
Hans Zinsser
Suggestions For Further Reading	403	(1)
Additional Resources	404	(1)
Permissions	405	(6)
Illustration Credits	411	(1)
Index of Authors	412	(2)
About The Editors	414

Excerpts

Introduction

It's the humdrum, day-in, day-out, everyday work that is the real satisfaction of the practice of medicine; the million and a half patients a man has seen on his daily visits over a forty-year period of weekdays and Sundays that make up his life. I have never had a money practice; it would have been impossible for me. But the actual calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives, when they were being born, when they were dying, watching them die, watching them get well when they were ill, has always absorbed me.

In these few sentences from William Carlos Williams's autobiography, he has captured very well the human splendor of medicine. We have tried to do the same in compiling this anthology, which contains stories, poems, essays, excerpts, and memoirs. In the process of caring for their patients, physicians have a unique -- and privileged -- window on the full range of human emotions. Literature, too, is rich in its descriptions of individual illnesses and plagues, in its capacity to reveal patients' reactions to illness and doctors' dilemmas in providing care. In its own way, literature defines the medical profession and fits into the larger society. Legacies and traditions, which are an important part of medicine, are often best manifested in the literature of a given period of history. Many of our selections were written by physicians. Williams and Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham and Lewis Thomas are only a few of the physician-writers who have relied on their medical backgrounds to help them understand better the frailties and strengths, the wonderment of the human condition. Some carried on a lifelong practice of medicine while simultaneously achieving literary recognition. Dr. Williams is a fine example -- his work, it seems fair to say, changed the face of American poetry, even as he carried on a large medical practice (he delivered over three thousand babies, for example). Somerset Maugham, although he discontinued his medical practice after internship, gave full credit to the experience in his autobiographicalThe Summing Up: "I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession." Others, so well known for their writing, were also trained in the medicine of their day. It is not generally known, for example, that the Romantic poet John Keats did a five-year apprenticeship with a surgeon. During those years he delivered so many babies that he was not required to take obstetrics and gynecology during the hospital phase of his training.

Of course, one need not be trained in medicine in order to make cogent and crucial observations about what it is like to be sick, hence vulnerable; to witness and record the isolation and alienation that comes eventually to all of us -- finally, we are all patients. Consider the poems of the late Jane Kenyon and her husband, Donald Hall. Their writings poignantly describe the time before their ultimate separation by her death, in 1995. Their poems are human documents without parallel. In his compelling short story "The Immortals," Jorge Luis Borges (also not a physician) comments trenchantly and presciently on some of the major ethical dilemmas of our time, those centering on organ transplants and utilization of scarce medical resources.

We have included many poems in this anthology. Poems recommend themselves to the editors of such a work because of their economy of form: in a few words a poem can communicate a complete experience. Read aloud Margaret Atwood's "The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart." In its rhythms one can hear the heart, first regular, then skipping. Or listen to the courage embodied in James Dickey's "The Cancer Match." Read Emily Dickinson's short poems, which transcend time and place to speak to us in completely modern -- and human -- terms. And share with Patricia Goedicke (in "One More Time") the universal experience of having an X ray taken: "When the technician says breathe / I breathe."

Nor have we neglected the wisdom gathered in essays from major clinical figures and teachers over the years; hence, Lewis Thomas's "House Calls" is included. We begin this book, in fact, with just such an essay, one that impressed us from the first time we encountered it in the pages of theNew England Journal of Medicine: Carola Eisenberg's "It Is Still a Privilege to Be a Doctor." The reader will find his or her own favorites among the many others we have included.

This third edition ofOn Doctoringprovided us with the chance to add other voices to those previously included: remarkable writing from physician-writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Susan Onthank Mates, for example. Many writers new to this anthology are well known and widely published: Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, Paul Zimmer, Donald Justice, Derek Mahon, and Jenny Joseph. We note with pride that our youngest author ever is included in these pages: Gregory Edwards was ten years old when he wrote his insightful -- and humorous -- poem called "The Shot."

Each one of us, of course, has a vast and vested interest in what goes on in the myriad arenas of medicine -- and in the nature of the individual doctor-patient encounters explored within the pages of this book. This is all to the good: physicians and patients must continue to talk and listen together -- and literature can help in that exchange. As editors, we are pleased to have had some part in this dialogue: prior editions ofOn Doctoringhave had a combined readership of two hundred thousand.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "To affect the quality of the day -- that is the highest of arts." Both medicine and literature have the capacity to affect the quality of the human day. Resonances between these two disciplines offer us a unique view of the human condition that neither one alone can provide. Read. And enjoy.

The Editors

Copyright © 1991, 1995, 2001 by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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Excerpted from On Doctoring
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.