The Soul of Medicine - by James Raymond (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Unlike many individuals who enter medicine, it was not something I contemplated from the beginning. I wanted to be a scientist...until I became disillusioned with that enterprise. Currently I'm a physician executive recently retired. Following medical school, I trained in Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine. It's the latter that I practiced clinically.

Through an exploration of great thinkers and philosophers, coupled with my own interactions with patients and colleagues, I've come to understand that medicine is a social, moral, philosophical, and existential enterprise, of which science is only one aspect.

I respect science, but don't worship it. Science is about facts that can be tested; philosophy and the humanities are about ideas that can be imagined, and stories that can be told.

Through the presentation of philosophical and normative issues, elucidated through stories, my goal in writing this book is to inspire tomorrow's physicians, medical ethicists, and other healers and thinkers to reject the roles we've been assigned, become more authentic in our everyday lives, and transcend the inadequacy of science through imagination and improvisation.

This is how the Soul of Medicine will be restored.

Review Quotes

"A curiously imaginative, brutally honest exploration by a physician into the many ways human limits, failures, and mortality infect medicine to the core. This a profoundly ethical work, not for the answers it provides but rather for the way it brings us to discern the questions we should be asking." -George Khushf, PhD, Professor and Director, Center for Bioethics, University of South Carolina

"Jim Raymond has written a work that beautifully demonstrates how he utilized both his heart and mind in order to experience the full gamut of emotions and knowledge that medicine can bring to its best practitioners. Both healthcare professionals and laypersons alike will glean much from this excellent work." -Ellis "Mac" Knight, MD, MBA, Coker Group

"Dr. Raymond shares humorous and poignant personal and professional experiences as a physician that apply to all of us as we each seek to create our own journey through this life and beyond. For physicians and physicians-to-be who struggle with the "simplification" of their profession to the application of scientific principles and practices this is a must read; more importantly for anyone facing the issues of dehumanization in today's post-modern world, this work can provide some insights into what it means to be fully human." -Shawn Stinson, MD FACP, SVP Healthcare Innovation and Improvement

"In the broad category of literature that might be titled 'Medicine and the Humanities, ' The Soul of Medicine is destined to become a classic. In an era when doctors seem to be focused solely on the science and the business of health care, Jim Raymond reminds us that, at its core, the practice of medicine still requires us to wrestle with profound questions about living, and dying." --James L. Reinertsen, MD