The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine by Elliott, Carl

The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822323693)

Vendor: Carl Elliott
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$25.95
$25.95
$25.95
Subtotal: $25.95
The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine by Elliott, Carl

The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine

$25.95
The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine by Elliott, Carl

The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine

$25.95
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x
Walker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. Trained as a doctor at Columbia University, he contracted tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital and spent the next three years recovering, primarily in TB sanitoriums. This collection of essays explores not only Percy's connections to medicine but also the underappreciated impact his art has had-and can have-on medicine itself.
The contributors-physicians, philosophers, and literary critics-examine the relevance of Percy's work to current dilemmas in medical education and health policy. They reflect upon the role doctors and patients play in his novels, his family legacy of depression, how his medical background influenced his writing style, and his philosophy of psychiatry. They contemplate the private ways in which Percy's work affected their own lives and analyze the author's tendency to contrast the medical-scientific worldview with a more spiritual one. Assessing Percy's stature as an author and elucidating the many ways that reading and writing can combine with diagnosing and treating to offer an antidote to despair, they ask what it means to be a doctor, a writer, and a seeker of cures and truths-not just for the body but for the malaise and diseased spirituality of modern times.
This collection will appeal to lovers of literature as well as medical professionals-indeed, anyone concerned with medical ethics and the human side of doctoring.

Contributors. Robert Coles, Brock Eide, Carl Elliott, John D. Lantos, Ross McElwee, Richard Martinez, Martha Montello, David Schiedermayer, Jay Tolson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman



Author: Carl Elliott
ISBN-10: 0822323699
ISBN-13: 9780822323693
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/13/1999
Pages: 184
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.39d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/04/1999 pg. 59
By Carl Elliott
By Carl Elliott
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Carl Elliott is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity and The Rules of Insanity: Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness.

John D. Lantos is Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Do We Still Need Doctors? and coeditor of Primum Non Nocere Today.

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