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Excerpt: The Quest for Mercy
SSR: Editing
Preface
This book is about medicine and the caregiver in today's society. I have written it from the perspective of an educator deeply involved in practicing and teaching medicine for almost thirty-five years. At first, I had only younger and future colleagues in mind. As the book progressed, however, I also attempted to make it a work of interest to anyone concerned with his or her own health in particular and with health care reform in general.
Health care is a wonderful calling because it involves the professional in all aspects at both extremes and along the full continuum of life's experiences. But on occasion over the years, I have found myself in circumstances demanding actions that have challenged the boundaries between my various life roles (physician, husband, father, son, brother, citizen, friend). The appropriate responses, however, were not articulated in medical textbooks. I wish that, as a medical student and young physician, I had been provoked to ponder some of the less concrete and less technical aspects of physicianhood—for example, dealing with the joy, birth, healing, growth, suffering, pain, separation, and death that I discuss in the following pages. They are compelling but often overlooked aspects of clinical practice that arise in one form or another every day.
During the course of writing this book, I suddenly found myself cast in yet another role. This time I was a patient. Furthermore, I was a patient with a complex, serious disease. My perspective on our health care system changed dramatically.
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