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Today, Friday June 5th, I am going to see the man who killed my father. So begins a journey for the doctor-narrator as he tries to understand his father's death twenty years earlier. On the way, he reflects on his medical career, which he calls The White Life, and how it has led to this meeting. His relationship with George Dittus, an unforgettable patient, leads up to the visit. In trying to save Mr. Dittus, the doctor's eye is drawn to the unexpected, the contradictory, the ecstatic. He learns that if medicine is an assembly of facts, then doctoring is making sense of the unnamed, and his work is a marriage of the two. Caring for George Dittus finally makes it unbearable not to take the journey home. Describing the plain facts of his medical life, the narrator is forthright and unsentimental, interweaving his own history with the histories of patients. In trying to save others, he hopes to save himself. The consequences of his journey become greater than he had imagined, climaxing with powerful revelations. Most of all, THE WHITE LIFE is a fascinating meditation on the nature of medicine, having all the makings of a new classic in the literature of illness. MICHAEL STEIN, a physician, teaches at Brown University. His writings have appeared in many magazines including Threepenny Review, Doubletake, and Southwest Review.
Price: $16.00
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