Patient Encounters: The Experience of Disease

Abstract

I was moved to tears by this book, but that may have been because after two weeks of hectic speaking engagements, I read it all through, sitting quietly in the sun gazing at Long Island Sound on a Saturday, relatively at peace. James Buchanan, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Akron, who has, so he tells us, taken formal coursework in medicine, worked in physiological laboratories, and been a consultant for ethics review boards, has prepared himself in every way for these stories, all true, which prove a guide to what it means to be sick. To observe or treat a disease is not the same as to suffer from it, he emphasizes. His book provides valuable lessons to physicians. He divides the book into five parts. The first and longest, Diseases of the Soul, has to do with central nervous system disease; the second, Metabolic Furnaces,