Patients, Doctors, and Illness

A woman with what is quite probably a terminal illness must choose between courses of treatment based on contradictory diagnoses. A medical student causes acute pain in his patients as he learns to insert a central line. One doctor wonders how to react when a patient asks him to pray with her; another struggles to come to terms with his mistakes. A physician writes in prominent medical journal about facilitating a dying woman's wish to end her life on her own terms; letters to the editor reflect passionate responses both in support of and in opposition to his actions. These experiences and many more are vividly rendered in Patients, Doctors, and Illness, which brings together nineteen classic pieces that appeared in the first edition of The Social Medicine Reader with eighteen pieces new to this edition. This volume examines the roles and training of health care professionals and their relationships with patients, ethics in health care and end-of-life experiences and decisions. It includes fictional and non-fiction narratives and poetry; definitions and case-based discussions of moral precepts in health care, such as truth-telling, informed consent, privacy, and autonomy; and readings that provide legal, ethical, and practical perspectives on many familiar but persistent ethical and social questions raised by illness and care. Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.* A collection of readings - geared for medical students and students of public health - that deal with social and cultural issues in medicine