This abstract is from information provided by the publisher.
This haunting memoir is an important addition to the canon of AIDS literature. Scannell writes beautifully and with an insight that escapes most physicians.
—Abraham Verghese
Kate Scannell is the rare doctor who has been transformed by her patients. In this irresistible, informative, and enormously moving book, she tells us not only her own story, but theirs.
—Gloria Steinem
Kate Scannell abandoned her academic career in 1985 to enter an ordinary medical practice in Northern California. Instead, the thirty-two-year-old physician found herself assigned to a county hospital AIDS ward where much of the medicine she has studied over many difficult years is rendered irrelevant.
Working with AIDS patients, nearly all of whom are dying, Scannell discovers the inadequacy of the “good” doctor who battles illness to keep patients alive regardless of their suffering. By embracing her patients? need for compassion and healing, Scannell reaches an expanded understanding of her patients and of herself as a physician.
THE DEATH OF THE GOOD DOCTOR richly chronicles the intimacy of Scannell?s relationships with her patients ? through whom the vast complexities of the epidemic are uniquely focused. Scannell writes not only as a physician but as a woman who entered medical school having never seen a woman physician and who, at midlife, now faces ovarian cancer. It is through these beautiful, often difficult, and sometimes humorous portraits that the woman and the physician discover each other.
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