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

By Howard M. Spiro

Book Overview

The treatment of medical illness today depends much more on science and technology than on the physician's ability to listen, comfort, and prescribe. Medicine is not only increasingly technical but is also increasingly involved with legal, governmental, and insurance constraints on patient care, and this state of affairs has done much to distance physicians from their patients. This important book seeks to restore empathy to medical practice, to demonstrate how important it is for doctors to listen to their patients, to experience and understand what their patients are feeling.

The book--a collection of essays by physicians, philosophers, and a nurse--is divided into three parts: one deals with how empathy is weakened or lost during the course of medical education and suggests how to remedy this; another describes the historical and philosophical origins of empathy and provides arguments for and against it; and a third section offers compelling accounts of how physicians' empathy for their patients has affected their own lives and the lives of those in their care. We hear, for example, from a physician working in a hospice who relates the ways that the staff tries to listen and respond to the needs of the dying; a scientist who interviews candidates for medical school and tells how qualities of empathy are undervalued by selection committees; a health professional who considers what her profession can teach physicians about empathy; another physician who ponders whether the desire to be empathic can hinder the detachment necessary for objective care; and several contributors who show how literature and art can help physicians to develop empathy. Medicine, asserts most of these authors, is both science and narrative, reason and intuition. Empathy underlies the qualities of the humanistic physician and must frame the skills of all professionals who care for patients.

Prepared under the auspices of the Program for Humanities in Medicine, Yale University School of Med

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300066708
• ISBN13: 9780300066708
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Compassionate Physician

Whereas modern medicine has become so technologically oriented, here is a book which emphasizes the humanity and the need to take the whole person into account. The author is an eminent gastroenterologist who has been practicing medicine for almost 50 years, and he still enjoys his work because he he enjoys people and helping them. It is a book which every practicing physician should read, and can also be most helpful for patients. A wonderful book by a wise and compassionate human being.

Highly Recommended

I am a returning student, non-traditional. I have been in science and research for 6 years, and now I am returning to undergraduate classes in hopes of gaining admission to medical school. I found this book in a used bookstore and have not been able to stop reading it. Excellent essays and ruminations on what empathy is, how it is attained and lost and how it might be taught. Excellent reading of an academic nature directly applicable to any student planning on entering the healthcare field.

The Best Book for Undergraduate and Medical Students

Hello, I am undergraduat student with a goal of becoming a caring physician. While I was working as a volunteer at the University Hospital, my coordinator told me about this book. I wrote to the publisher and requested a copy from them. This was by the far the best book I have read in my college career. The chapters are well written and organized. Chapter 3 in this book was the most remarkable chapter for me. It opened my eyes in many different ways. It sort of helped me become even more mature... A Must Buy for all the pre-medical student and Medical Students.