Attending Others [Hardcover]

Becoming a doctor requires years of formal education, but one learns the practice of medicine only through direct encounters with the fragile others called patients. Pediatrician Brian Volck recounts his own education in the mysteries of suffering bodies, powerful words, and natural beauty. It's a curriculum where the best teachers are children and their mothers, the classrooms are Central American villages and desert landscapes, and the essential texts are stories, poems, and paintings. Through practices of focused attention, he grows from detached observer of his patients' lives into an uneasy witness and grateful companion. From the inner city to the Navajo Nation and from the Grand Canyon to the mountains of Honduras, Volck learns to listen to children unable to talk, to assist in healing when cure is impossible, and to love those whose life and experiences are radically different from his own. This is not a how-to book or a brief for reforming medical education. Attending Others is a highly personal account of what the author learned about medicine after he completed his formal education. The short answer, it turns out, is pretty much everything. Your medical education and practice have taught you the art of learning stories. By schooling better known to you than me, you have acquired the art of telling the stories you have learned. As a story-teller you are an excellent artist. I know this because you are able to reveal, in no more words than necessary, not only how you do your work, but more importantly, why. --Wendell Berry, from a letter to the author Brian Volck's stories are not just about medical life, though medicine is his profession, his vocation, and a frame and focus of the stories that make up this rich memoir.Attending Othersrefers to much more than medical care in these stories about learning to live among and love a Navajo community in New Mexico, rural folk in Honduras, and urbanites in Baltimore and Cincinnati. The attention Volck palc%