The Soul of Medicine

Unlike many individuals who enter medicine, it was not something I contemplated from the beginning. I wanted to be a scientist...until I became disillusioned with that enterprise. Currently I’m a physician executive recently retired. Following medical school, I trained in Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine. It’s the latter that I practiced clinically. Through an exploration of great thinkers and philosophers, coupled with my own interactions with patients and colleagues, I’ve come to understand that medicine is a social, moral, philosophical, and existential enterprise, of which science is only one aspect. I respect science, but don’t worship it. Science is about facts that can be tested; philosophy and the humanities are about ideas that can be imagined, and stories that can be told. Through the presentation of philosophical and normative issues, elucidated through stories, my goal in writing this book is to inspire tomorrow’s physicians, medical ethicists, and other healers and thinkers to reject the roles we’ve been assigned, become more authentic in our everyday lives, and transcend the inadequacy of science through imagination and improvisation. This is how the Soul of Medicine will be restored.