Attending to Souls as Well as to Bodies: Talking about Talking with Doctors

THE PUBLISHING WORLD, of late, has seen an upsurge in the genre of so-called narrative medicine, the physician as raconteur of his or her own experience. From The New York Times, where one finds weekly writings about patient-cloctor relationships, to The New Yorker essayists and authors Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman, along with a host of newcomers on the scene, there is no shortage of doctors exploring the mysteries of making complicated diagnoses, recommending treatment options, coping with professional and personal challenges, and-interacting intimately and empathically with ill patients. Now, here is artist and psychoanalyst David Newman, one of our own, coming at the medical narrative from the opposite perspective-that of the patient. In this reflective and often disturbing book, Talking with Doctors, Newman, a supervisor and faculty member of the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, gives us a harrowing account of his own out-of-the blue diagnosis of a highly aggressive and potentially terminal brain tumor and the treatment he sought for survival. From the shock of the opening-"In early September 1999 I was told I had a large, malignant, life-threatening tumor in the center of my skull" (p, I)-we are taken on the roller-coaster ride of Newman's journey,