Reviews
"BLOCKBUSTER" --Boston Harold Advertiser, Publishers Weekly
Charles Harris' One Man's Medicine is grittier [than other novels of
this genre.] ---Michael Halberstam, M.D.
"A portrait of a contemporary physician, warts and all diligently
probed."--Booklist
"Lifts the veil on certain aspects of medical practice as no other book has
done in year...Vivid case-histories."--John Barkham Reviews
"Totally engrossing...Dr. Harris forces his reader to
experience the sights and smells and realities of medicine." --Bobby Mather,
Detroit Free Press
"Read with empathy or read with anger; read with understanding or read
with disbelief; read with laughter or read and cry: but be sure to read it."
--Arthur M. Sackler, M.D. Medical Tribune
"A blockbuster...hurling a thunderbolt of charges at the administrators of
medical programs." --P. Albert Duhamel, Boston Herald Advertiser
"A blockbuster---Publishers Weekly
"What is convincing is the sense of knowledge, and a kind of bawdy,
physically explicit recollection of bodies and pain that is sometimes muted, in
the great Arrowsmith tradition."---from the Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1975,
review by Richard Wald
Living and Loving Medicine
review by Arthur Sackler
Charles Harris, M.D., in One Man's Medicine, has written what he calls
a "fictionalized memoir about medicine," but if that's fiction, then I am
Robinson Crusoe.
One Man's Medicine is every doctor's book. If you are of my vintage or
of Harris' vintage, if you have trained interned up to the mid-40's, then you
will understand and identify with the experiences and the case histories he
presents. If you are a young doctor in medicine, the you may not understand but
could get a lot out of the contrast between doctors' and patients' lives today
and in that era, a scant thirty years ago, just preceding modern therapeutics.
Parallels in Life In its medical aspects (in his schooling and
training, in his internship, in his patients and what happened to them) Harris
almost literally describes much of my own life. In his "memoirs: on research
experiences in cancer investigations, he parallels my own in the psychiatric
community. Harris' experienced with community medicine was something, however,
with which I have had no experience.
This is a powerful book, written by a man who loves medicine and knows
that the only reason-for-being for you and me is really our patients. These are
the memoirs of a man who knows in every fiber of his being the importance of
people, as individuals, and the inescapable fact that patients are very special
people...
"Medicine...a great nation..." I share with Dr. Harris his sentimental
belief in the note that said: "Medicine is a great nation without boundaries.
The caduceus is its emblem, the Hippocratic oath its constitution." I shared
with him the starched white uniforms; but he was luckier than I, he got $12.50 a
month pay in the great city...
Balanceing Lighter Moments You will recognize Harris' medical wards,
how patients die, and how that transition can be made so much easier by the love
and affection of real physician for his patient. You can love your patient and
still retain the objectivity for good medicine and preserve your own sanity at
the insensate turns of fate which takes so many innocent and beautiful people so
much before their time.
Here is a doctor who in his conviction about people and patients wen
from research into community medicine. He did so to help patients. He went, with
a mind that was as open as his heart, into an experience that was as
disillusioning as it was shattering. This is not an old conservative speaking
but a doctor, young in his thinking and dedicated in his beliefs.
His book is a good book. I should say it is a very good book. It is a
great presentation of a slice of medical reality and medical history.--Arthur M.
Sackler, M.D. International Publisher, Medical Tribune
---
Medical novels in this genre abound, however, and I believe this helps
us know why doctors are different from other people. As physicians [we] have
long since become used to the routine of medicine, just as we once were to the
routine of medical school. We take bad smells and bad sights for granted. We
probe people's bodies, ask them about their innermost lives, examine their
blood, urine, and feces.
. . .The medical school novel has a formula as classic as that of a
Western, and, as in the Western, the formula has a specific purpose. The
audience is shocked by the offhand treatment of bodily functions, frightened by
the arcane mysteries of the anatomy lab, and impressed by the terrible pressure
under which medical students work.
The medical school novel, thus, is a kind of expose of priesthood. We
see the apprentice priests handling forbidden substances, being tempted by
mortals, succumbing to doubts and unworthy actions, and finally ascending to the
priesthood. --- Michael Halberstam, MD, practiced internal medicine in
Washington, D.C. and wrote frequently for national publications, from AMA News,
January 17,1977
---
This remarkable "fictionalized memoir is a blockbuster. Dr. Harris'
reminiscences if medical school, internship and outrage at the devious politics
of institution officials. Written with bitter humor, his characterizations have
an authentic ring. He reports his love affair with Elspeth, a nurse; describes
his devotion to Simon Lapius, one of the few dedicated physicians he
encountered; relates his disturbing experience as projects director of a
community health center. Here his hands were tied by the interracial staff's
insistence on phony priorities-nurses demanding equality with doctors, young
neighborhood blacks taking over a room in the center for their hashish sessions.
This book is not for the squeamish, but it deserves and probably will get a wide
audience.---Harper & Row Publishers, 1975
---
One Man's Medicine is strong
stuff to take-not the usual novitiate account although that's there too-but a
rough, often funny, blunt book full of materia morbida and also full of some of
the issues and values which are at stake-not in the making of a doctor or a
surgeon but a physician-a distinction you will have learned by the end of the
book. This is a journal of sorts (names have obviously been changed of both
people and facilities) in parts taking place some time in the 40's and beginning
in a city hospital called The County with an overcrowded patient load and one
Medical Director, Dr. Simon Quentin Lapius, who is the guiding presence of this
book. Here the author or "Harry" goes through obstetrics and the running sore
that is gynecology, the medical wards with their "ministry of the dying" the
morgue where "death is the textbook, pathology the great medical teacher." He
then goes into cancer research to realize just how spiteful and proprietary is
this world with its infighting between the public foundation man and the private
researcher. On to a Community Health Center in a destitute urban neighborhood
and this last phase coincides with Lapius' slow death of Parkinson's (too soon
for L-DOPA, too late for anything else) as lacerating an experience as you will
read anywhere. Lapius, in the fetor of his failing functions, does not go
gently, even if by the end he will have triumphed over this book...Harris writes
loosely, without rubber gloves-in so doing he manages to convey much more than
just the facts of life or death with an unconfined humanity, close to the heart
and the gut.
--- Kirhus, January 15, 1977
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