The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics Hardcover – May 13, 2014
Author: Visit Amazon's Barron H. Lerner Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0807033405 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics – May 13, 2014
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The private and professional lives of two doctors—father and son—are bared in this memoir of a medical family. The younger Dr. Lerner, an internist-historian-ethicist, reminisces and reflects on his father’s extreme devotion to the care of patients. The elder Lerner, an infectious-disease specialist, is portrayed as an old-school, benevolent MD with a take-charge approach. Dad is a practitioner of medical paternalism. Son stands up for patient autonomy. But while reading his father’s personal journals years later, the younger Lerner becomes aware of the congruity between parenting and doctoring: “knowing when to insist on something and knowing when to let go.” He wonders if contemporary medicine has become “too democratized.” Ethical issues—medical futility, informed consent, rationing of medical resources, truth telling, medical errors, and overreliance on testing and technology—are depicted as complex and often controversial. Despite their differing perspectives and generational gap, these two doctors are in complete agreement about the paramount importance of the physician-patient relationship and the necessity of humanism in the medical profession. --Tony Miksanek
Review
“Exquisitely insightful... The Good Doctor poses a fundamental riddle faced by every historian: How can we question the decisions and attitudes of our forebears without having experienced the contexts that shaped them? It makes for a particularly compelling discussion when the players are father and son, sharing as their lives’ work an ethically charged, ever-changing profession.” —New York Times
“Barron Lerner’s marvelous book—a deeply intimate story about his father and the practice of medicine—touches on some of the most profound issues in medicine today: autonomy, medical wisdom, empathy, paternalism and the evolving roles of the doctor and patient. This is one of the most thoughtful and provocative books that I have read in a long time, and I suspect that generations of doctors and patients will find it just as thought provoking.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies
“The Good Doctor is a lovely book and a loving book; it's a book about medicine and family and ethics and history which embraces complexity and speaks to all those subjects with wide-ranging compassion and great good sense. And it's a father-son doctor saga with much to say about the healing power of story and understanding.”
—Perri Klass, MD, author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure and The Mercy Rule
“An absolutely compelling treatise on bioethics told thru the lens of a physician's relationship with his physician father. If you want to understand the modern state of ethics in medicine, read this book.”
—Mehmet Oz, MD, Professor and Vice Chair, Surgery NY Presbyterian/Columbia
“A heartwarming story about a father-son doctor duo spanning a century, exquisitely showing the evolution of medical practice from antibiotics through bioethics. A small gem of a book.”
—Samuel Shem, MD, author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place
“Barron Lerner’s marvelous book—a deeply intimate story about his father and the practice of medicine—touches on some of the most profound issues in medicine today: autonomy, medical wisdom, empathy, paternalism and the evolving roles of the doctor and patient. This is one of the most thoughtful and provocative books that I have read in a long time, and I suspect that generations of doctors and patients will find it just as thought provoking.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies
“The Good Doctor is a lovely book and a loving book; it's a book about medicine and family and ethics and history which embraces complexity and speaks to all those subjects with wide-ranging compassion and great good sense. And it's a father-son doctor saga with much to say about the healing power of story and understanding.”
—Perri Klass, MD, author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure and The Mercy Rule
“An absolutely compelling treatise on bioethics told thru the lens of a physician's relationship with his physician father. If you want to understand the modern state of ethics in medicine, read this book.”
—Mehmet Oz, MD, Professor and Vice Chair, Surgery NY Presbyterian/Columbia
“A heartwarming story about a father-son doctor duo spanning a century, exquisitely showing the evolution of medical practice from antibiotics through bioethics. A small gem of a book.”
—Samuel Shem, MD, author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place
See all Editorial Reviews
Direct download links available for The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics – May 13, 2014
- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Beacon Press (May 13, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807033405
- ISBN-13: 978-0807033401
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #39,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Doctor-Patient Relations
- #21 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Medical Ethics
After hearing Barron Lerner give a lecture on this subject in 2013, I had been eagerly awaiting the publication of his book. It did not disappoint. Anyone looking for easy answers to the complex ethical questions raised in the book will go away unsatisfied. Rather, what the book does is present these questions in a deeply personal light and in a way that is tractable to the lay person. As such, the reader is left with the context to explore questions which, whether doctor or patient (or both), ultimately impact all of us.
Lerner details his own career in medicine and that of his father, Phil Lerner. The two have much in common: both became accomplished physicians who eschewed the more conventional path of a private practice, both were dedicated to their patients, and both focused on delivering the best medical care possible while engaging in research to advance the medical field. The differences in their careers largely derive from the different historical contexts in which they were trained and in which they practiced medicine. The elder Dr. Lerner practiced in the paternalistic era of medicine in which “doctors knew best”, routinely withheld information from their patients, and made unilateral treatment decisions on behalf of those patients. His son became a doctor in a different era, when the doctor-patient relationship was evolving to one in which patients are now more informed about and involved in decisions related to their care.
The differences in their careers would make for an interesting story by itself. What makes this book so compelling is that studying and understanding those differences within the larger practice of medicine has been a focus of Barron Lerner’s career as a physician, medical historian and bioethicist.
Barron H. Lerner's "The Good Doctor" is the author's account of his ambivalent relationship with his father, Phillip, a dedicated medical practitioner, teacher, and infectious disease specialist. In this poignant and candid memoir, Lerner traces his family's roots to Poland. Most of Barron's ancestors came to America before the Holocaust, and once here, they found jobs, established homes, raised families, and worked hard so that their children could succeed in life. Phillip, who was born in Cleveland in 1932, became a brilliant and dedicated physician. He spent countless hours on call, and was usually available whenever a patient or colleague sought his advice.
Dr. Phillip Lerner even provided treatment to his sick relatives. Barron, a highly respected doctor himself, as well as a medical historian and ethicist, insists that it is a conflict of interest for a doctor to treat his loved ones. Nevertheless, Barron's dad thought that he knew best. He was a proponent of "paternalistic" medicine, asserting that it is acceptable for doctors to care for their grandparents, aunts, and cousins. Under certain circumstances, he withheld information from patients about their prognosis and, furthermore, he considered it his duty to help terminally ill patients pass away peacefully.
This is a colorful portrait of an extended family and a close look at the career of a healer who enjoyed what he did until "cookbook medicine," high-tech tests, managed care, and advance medical directives became commonplace. Barron and his father differed on a number of issues. For example, the younger Dr. Lerner is a champion of informed consent and insists that, whenever possible, physicians should confer with their patients and/or next of kin about their medical options.
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