Research Catalog

Title

Empathy and the practice of medicine : beyond pills and the scalpel / edited by Howard M. Spiro ... [et al.].

Publication

New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, c1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Spiro, Howard M. (Howard Marget), 1924-

Description

xi, 208 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

• This important book seeks to restore empathy to medical practice: to demonstrate how important it is for doctors to listen to their patients and to experience and understand what their patients are feeling. 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 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.
• The book - which includes 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 try 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 nurse who considers what nursing 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.

Subjects

• Medical personnel and patient
• Physician and patient
• Physician-Patient Relations
• Empathy
• Health Personnel

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Foreword / Richard Selzer -- 1. Empathy: An Introduction / Howard M. Spiro -- 2. What Is Empathy and Can It Be Taught? / Howard M. Spiro -- 3. Sketches from a Surgeon's Notebook / George S. Bascom -- 4. A Deep Dying / John Stone -- 5. Travels in the Valley of the Shadow / Joanne Lynn -- 6. Letters of Intent / Michael A. Lacombe -- 7. The Pre-Med as a Metaphor of Antipathy / Harold J. Morowitz -- 8. Doctors, Nurses, and Empathy / Jeanne Levasseur and David R. Vance -- 9. The Empathic Physician: Nature and Nurture / Shimon M. Glick -- 10. . . . And the Least of These Is Empathy / Richard L. Landau -- 11. Selective Empathy / Richard E. Peschel and Enid Peschel -- 12. Science, Pedagogy, and the Transformation of Empathy in Medicine / Stanley Joel Reiser -- 13. Lessons in Empathy: Literature, Art, and Medicine / Helle Mathiasen and Joseph S. Alpert -- 14. The Narrative Road to Empathy / Rita Charon -- 15. Empathy: Using Resonance Emotions in the Service of Curiosity / Jodi Halpern.
• 16. Empathic Immersion / Peter Kramer -- 17. Epilogue / Howard M. Spiro.

ISBN

0300058403

LCCN

93027733

OCLC

• 28377147
• ocm28377147
• SCSB-4721590

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries