Review: The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside by Sherwin B. Nuland

4 stars for The Soul of Medicine: Tales from the Bedside by Sherwin B. Nuland.

This book is a collection of narratives on the most memorable patient ever seen by Family Physicians, Anesthesiologists, Bronchoscopists, Cardiologists, Dermatologists, Gastroenterologists, Geriatricians, Nephrologists, Neurologists, Neurosurgeons, Obstetricians, Pediatricians, Surgeons, Urologists and some others. These personal recollections demonstrate the aspects of the ethics of medicine, the ways in which science changes and how doctors approach certain kinds of problems in their own particular ways.

The topics shared range from a simple case of a minor facial rash to a complicated one involving life threatening pneumonia and partial collapse of the lung, from treatment of a bleeding polyp to organ transplantation, from simple observation and traditional physical examination of the body to technologies that approach the most advanced that medicine now offers.

At the end of my reading, the phrase that keeps popping up in my mind is "Primum non nocere", a Latin phrase that means "first, do no harm." It is a simple dictum that the duty of the healer is "to do good, or at least to do no harm". Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good."

And to me, "Primum non nocere" is the real lesson of humanity for all, physicians or not, but physicians especially.


Publisher: Kaplan Aec Education
Publication date: 14 Apr 2009

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Like all doctors, Sherwin Nuland collects stories, and over thirty years in the practice of surgery, he has collected a consider number of both his own stories as well as the stories of surgeons he has worked with and admires.

The remarkable stories told in this book are filled with the lessons of humanity. They describe that sacrosanct connection between two people we call the doctor-patient relationship, and that other relationship between the mentor and student, so important to the perpetuation of medical knowledge, judgement, wisdom and character. Doctors have peculiar ways of approaching certain kinds of problems, and many of those ways are captured with grace and elequence in "The Soul of Medicine."

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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