Epilogue

  • Harvey Mandell
  • Howard Spiro

Abstract

The stories you have read here were not easy to collect. We doctors write case histories every day, but we rarely write stories about our patients, and too few of us write about our own illnesses. There are a few exceptions: an occasional portrayal in the British Medical Journal, Lancet, or New England Journal of Medicine. The most notable predecessor to this volume is the Miller and Pinner book, which appeared in 1947.1 That book deserves rereading, although some of it is curiously dated in the 1980s, as if the viewpoints of physicians have altered almost as dramatically as the technology that supports them. Many of the writers in Miller and Pinner were psychiatrists, and some of the richest accounts in this book were also written by psychiatrists or those who had found help from them during their illness.

Keywords

England Journal Truth Telling Rich Account Postoperative Lung Function Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1988

Authors and Affiliations

  • Harvey Mandell
    • 1
  • Howard Spiro
    • 2
  1. 1.The William W. Backus HospitalNorwichUSA
  2. 2.Yale University School of MedicineNew HavenUSA

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