The Social Medicine Reader, Second Edition: Volume One: Patients, Doctors, and Illness

Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today’s health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.

Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:
“A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better.”-Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Praise for the first edition:
“This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators.”-Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association

Volume 1:

A woman with what is quite probably a terminal illness must choose between courses of treatment based on contradictory diagnoses. A medical student causes acute pain in his patients as he learns to insert a central line. One doctor wonders how to react when a patient asks him to pray with her; another struggles to come to terms with his mistakes. A physician writes in a prominent medical journal about facilitating a dying woman’s wish to end her life on her own terms; letters to the editor reflect passionate responses both in support of and in opposition to his actions. These experiences and many more are vividly rendered in Patients, Doctors, and Illness, which brings together nineteen pieces that appeared in the first edition of The Social Medicine Reader and eighteen pieces new to this edition. This volume examines the roles and training of health care professionals and their relationship with patients, ethics in health care, and end-of-life experiences and decisions. It includes fiction and nonfiction narratives and poetry; definitions and case-based discussions of moral precepts in health care, such as truth telling, informed consent, privacy, and autonomy; and readings that provide legal, ethical, and practical perspectives on many familiar but persistent ethical and social questions raised by illness and care.

Contributors: Yehuda Amichai, Marcia Angell, George J. Annas, Marc D. Basson, Doris Betts, Amy Bloom, Abenaa Brewster, Raymond Carver, Eric J. Cassell, Larry R. Churchill, James Dickey, Gerald Dworkin, James Dwyer, Miles J. Edwards, Charles R. Feldstein, Chris Feudtner, Leonard Fleck, Arthur Frank, Benjamin Freedman, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman, Lawrence D. Grouse, David Hilfiker, Nancy M. P. King, Perri Klass, Melvin Konner, Bobbie Ann Mason, Steven H. Miles, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Timothy E. Quill, David Schenck, Daniel Shapiro, Susan W. Tolle, Alice Stewart Trillin, William Carlos Williams

Nancy M. P. King, Associate Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Making Sense of Advance Directives.

Ronald P. Strauss is Professor of Dental Ecology and Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is author of numerous articles on social and ethical issues in the care of chronic illness.

Larry R. Churchill is Professor of and Chair of the Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Self-Interest and Universal Health Care: Why Well-Insured Americans Should Support Coverage for Everyone and Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice.

Sue E. Estroff is Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Making It Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community.

Gail E. Henderson, Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit.

Jonathan Oberlander is an associate professor of social medicine and an adjunct associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.