Introduction 7
Though many people quip that doctors make the worst patients, these physicians can offer vital lessons, based on their multiple personal, professional, medical, and existential transformations. Forced not only to doff their white coats, but now to strip bare in examining rooms, they faced disease and the threat of death, confronting and reevaluating their views and understandings of themselves, their roles, and their interactions with patients and colleagues. Hierarchies now turned upside down.
Ordinarily, human beings have just one main point of view, but these doctor-patients had two, and elucidated how these can be held, each at times shaping, or combining with, the other. These doctors had privileged and uncommon knowledge of‘‘ the Other.’’ Narratives, along with novels and films, can convey to us another person’ s point of view. Many of these doctors shuttled back and forth between these dual roles, as if between two parts of the brain; and over time, each position affected the other.
In their shuttling, these doctors illuminated the refractions between their dual roles of physician and patient— the width, depth, subdivisions, and substance of the chasm between these two poles. From Ovid to Dostoyevsky, such doublings have drawn artists and writers. The inner conflicts of the doctors here do not match the fictionalized extremes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde( though it is interesting to note that to depict such radical discontinuity, Robert Louis Stevenson chose a physician). Nonetheless, these individuals balanced or reconciled dual aspects of their identities. All ended up somewhere different from where they began. Managed care, evidence-based medicine, consumerism, and demands for more‘‘ caring’’ providers pressured and embattled these doctors both personally and professionally.
They often came to see how, in their efforts to fight disease in others, and now themselves, professional institutions can help but also hinder. Institutions and colleagues pushed them to occupy just one role— as doctor or patient— not a combination of both. Through all of these processes, ill physicians became more sensitive to both sets of perspectives in unparalleled ways.
Ill Physicians Helping Patients and Others
The lessons these doctors gained can help patients and families, current and future physicians, other health care professionals, and medical administrators and policymakers. Confrontation with their own mortality