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 i ... read full excerpt from: On Doctoring: New, Revised and Expanded Third Edition ebook