Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel

by Howard M. Spiro (Editor), Professor Enid Peschel (Editor), Professor Mary G. McCrea Curnen (Editor)

A collection of essays--written by physicians, philosophers, and a nurse--seeks to restore empathy to medical practice, describing how empathy is lost during a medical education and how this can be remedied.

Genres: Nonfiction, Medicine, Medical

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 29, 1993

Reviews

[William Crump · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the Dean of a medical school regional campus, I watched as students I interacted with over 6-8 years begin as curious empathetic pre-med college students transformed into efficient and disconnected senior medical residents. I discovered that this was a national problem, and this book provided a diffuse but useful description of the problem. I used it as the basis for a professional identity curriculum we developed in 2016 and I went back to the viewpoints it included many times since. When I began to write the "Healing Savannah" trilogy in 2021, I used it again as the basis of the secondary theme of these three books. My primary focus in these books was to make the case that West African, Indigenous American, and European healing traditions are much more alike than different. But in all three books I created characters representing these traditions displaying the empathy that is required for true healing, even when cure is not possible. Read and relish each chapter separated by at least a day of reflection and a night of sleep. It reads like good poetry.

[Cassandra Carico · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I found this book disturbing, to know how detached our medical professionals are trained and encouraged to be. A degree of detachment I can see as beneficial, but complete detachment cannot be healthy for anyone involved. This book details for medical professionals the importance of empathy in their practice and gives a sound argument for its necessity.