Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History

This book was originally written in the 1980's. I can't remember how I came across it. I think maybe it was on sale at the medical school library, or worse, that I checked it out and immediately lost it, meaning I had to pay for this lost book. Then I found it again, and just put it aside. In one of those times where I am forced to look through my own library to find something to read, I found this book again, thankfully. I don't know whether I laughed or moaned more in reading this book. Shorter wrote this book as a sociology book on doctors in the U.S. and Great Britain and their patients, from the early 1800's on to the 1980s. It was so true that reading it actually caused me pain! I recognized myself as one of the patients Shorter described so well...one who goes to doctors and who is as impatient with them as they are with me. So I gripe and complain, and continue on to find another doctor. Though I have not yet even looked at alternative medicine except for vitamins just because I have a known stomach problem. But having been through four years of med school as a Ph.D. student and not an MD, and coming across so many doctors in my life, I also recognize the many failings of our doctors today. My poor mother who has numerous arthritis problems and a decaying backbone and hips, and who deals with constant pain, has to also deal with these educated idiots who don't actually look at her or talk to her, they talk AT her, and then they talk DOWN to her. And she is so frail and I hate that they do that to my mother who should be treated with the utmost respect for living a good life and raising a good family, and who is merely asking for some help with the constant pain. Shorter is caustic and funny in some places. He writes well and with an open mind for the most part; obviously he not only researches the sociology of our medical system but lives with a doctor in his own family, his wife, which gave him plenty of inside information. My book is in bad shape, and we are redoing the book room, but I am loathe to let go of this book. I want to give it to a doctor who is a general practitioner, or an internist, and tell them to read it and pass it on to the next doctor or patient who needs to see themselves written about in this book. From reading this I will strive to be a lot less of the post-modern patient that he so succinctly describes. And I will learn to listen to others...because essentially that is all something we must learn to do: as doctors, as teachers, as family members, as human beings... Karen Sadler