Introduction 13
psychological difficulties (41, 42), yet such problems can potentially affect
patients adversely (43).
Educational efforts to help improve physician communication have
been attempted, but many physicians still clearly have trouble inter-
acting with their patients (44). Recent efforts to increase students’ em-
pathy through reading and discussing literature (45) to improve commu-
nication skills may help in the short term, though results have not
been entirely consistent (46, 47) and the long-term impacts remain
underassessed. Questions of how doctors and patients can best interact
are of rising consequence.
For their colleagues, these doctors’ experiences can be more poignant
and compelling than those of lay patients. They can help other trainees
and practitioners in medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, and other
health fields to see more clearly how patients perceive them. These
stories of sick physicians can encourage fellow providers to be more open
and sensitive to problems in communication, and to see what specifically
needs to be improved. Frequently, physicians dismiss patients’ criticisms:
‘‘Oh, it’s just the patient complaining.’’ But these sick doctors can say,
‘‘No, I am one of you, and these are legitimate gripes that I, as a patient,
know.’’ Other providers may come to recognize more fully that they,
too, will one day be patients, that the boundary between physicians and
patients is, in the end, nonexistent.
Prior Writings About Ill Physicians
Physicians such as Oliver Sacks, Fitzhugh Mullan, and Jody Heymann
have described their own personal experiences with particular disorders
(48, 49, 50). The Doctor, a film starring William Hurt, depicted one ex-
treme case: a cold, chauvinistic surgeon whose illness made him more
humane (51). Two books, by Pinner and Miller in 1952, and by Mandell
and Spiro in 1987, compiled single accounts by physicians, each describing
his or her particular experience with an illness (52, 53). But these two
compilations of individual stories, while valuable, were not organized the-
matically, to analyze issues systematically, investigating the same set of
concerns and questions with each physician to detect and examine pat-
terns, similarities and differences, and areas (e.g., death and dying) about
which individual physicians may be reluctant to comment, or do not
mention at all. These two books organized individual doctors’ reports by
disorders, like a medical textbook, with each report standing by itself.