Chicken soup for the doctor's soul

The Soul of the Physician: Doctors Speaking about Passion, Resilience, and Hope Linda Gambee Henry, James Douglas Henry, AMA Press 2002, 306 pp $32.95 (for CMA members), ISBN 1-57947-244-3

A collection of 33 stories, as told by different physicians mediated by the authors, and divided into 3 sections (passion, resilience, hope), the purpose of The Soul of the Physician is to serve as a kind of static forum: doctors can access it and, perhaps, identify with what is written. How they will identify is bound to differ. Some may feel the reassurance that comes with knowing someone else has traveled this territory. Others may feel grateful that they've been spared some of the calamities shared in the book. And for others, these narratives may impart that rarest of all feelings: gratitude for being a physician.

This book rides the crest of narrative medicine (amply explored in the book's foreword), and even though the heavyweights are absent (e.g., Sherwin B. Nuland, Atul Gawande, Jerome E. Groopman, etc.), Soul is both an example of and a testament to this style of writing, due to its scope and the fact that it achieves a kind of folksiness: by folk, for folk, with a man-on-the-street kind of reportage. Sometimes, though, the sharing goes too far. The book advocates that doctors share their experiences with patients, which strikes me as relationship-warping; there should be a no-fly area for this sort of thing. Indeed, the authors write that “[s]haring stories creates a sense of partnership.” But where does one stop? In the office, stories should begin and end with the patient. After all, patients see their doctor not to hear about their doctor's bugbears, but to sort out their own. Doctors who vent to their patients reverse the roles, and the patient, who ought to be chief object and subject, becomes secondary. We should not lean on our patients as therapists.

The chief metaphor of the book is the soul, and it would fair to call this book Chicken Soup for the Doctor's Soul. The soup is nourishing: the book revivified my taste for practising medicine. And it is the stories that provide the meat to the broth. The shtick around the idea of “soul” — in the introduction and larded as commentary throughout the book — is extraneous. These are tales of healing goodness meant to be good for you, nothing more.

The authors published a previous book on soul in health care and I gather they felt they could sing soul once again. If the soul could be divined, it would be through story. However, I wish it would be a story free of the soulless mush the Henrys subscribe to. The story's the thing; and the stories here do more than any silly, tacked-on, thesis-driven explanation can accomplish. What's the soul of a physician? What's a soul? What's a physician? This book will not tell you, but it will tell you a good story.