Overview

The Rhetoric of Medicine explores problems that confront medical professionals today by first examining similar problems that confronted physicians in ancient Greece. This framework provides illuminating entry points into challenges faced by the practice of medicine, enabling readers to understand more clearly their shape and operation in the modern context-as well as their possible solutions. Topics covered include: larger cultural ideas about the body; tension between professional values and working for money; effective collaboration and competition with alternative healthcare providers; restrictions on political involvement that are part of a physician's identity; maintaining a space for professional autonomy and judgment; mentoring that is effective but not exclusive; and physicians' recognition of themselves as patients as well as professionals. A unique collaboration between a classicist and a neurosurgeon, The Rhetoric of Medicine is a call to interrogate the narratives and ideas that shape medical care and to revise and replace those that do not serve patient health.

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9780190457518

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Reviews

"""If we spend the time to dig deeply into the ""rhetoric"" of medicine over time, as the authors Nicholson and Selden have done, we find the motivations of early doctors, their foibles and how they perceived themselves. It is an incredibly rich story with lessons around money, competition and autonomy for doctors and for the patients they serve."" --Sanjay Gupta, MD, Staff Neurosurgeon, The Emory Clinic, Atlanta, GA, Chief Medical Correspondent, CNN ""Nicholson and Selden offer a pioneering rejoinder to the persistent estrangement of classics and modern medicine. Acutely sensitive to cultural difference, the authors leverage the temporal and technological gulf between ancient Greek and modern American medicine to construct a nuanced and productive juxtaposition: by exposing the fault lines in the self-representation of ancient Greek doctors across an array of key issues, they generate new ways for the American physician to perceive and confront modern counterparts to these very tensions. This is a rare hybrid of a book that couples accessible but consummate expertise of the ancient material with concrete insights for practicing doctors."" --Margaret Foster, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN ""In this remarkable and wise book, a noted scholar of Ancient Greece and a leading medical educator illuminate several themes that bind together the stories we have told one another across two thousand years of history; the rhetoric that shapes conflicting views of major economic, social, and ethical issues common to the experience of physicians and patients in the age of Hippocrates; and those that still bedevil us in the contemporary era of modern medicine and technology. Practicing physicians, hospital administrators, and those who teach humanistic courses in Narrative Medicine and History of Science are among the many who will find The Rhetoric of Medicine a critical text for promoting the wellness of today's doctors and their patients."" --Michael Salcman, MD, Former Chair of Neurosurgery, University of Maryland, editor of Poetry in Medicine and special lecturer in the Osher Institute at Towson University, Towson, MD ""This unique and timely collaboration between a classicist and a physician re-connects cultural and rhetorical threads between ancient and modern medicine... There were good scientific reasons for medicine to modernize itself at the time, of course, but as this study shows, much was also lost in this wholesale break from its ancient tradition. By examining the rhetoric of Greek doctors as they contemplated (e.g., their relationship with patients, their own embodiment or their responsibilities as professional caregivers), Nicholson and Selden make a compelling case that medicine of our own time would benefit from a similarly self-conscious approach to how doctors talk about themselves and their profession... Within programs in medical humanities and bioethics in particular, this book will stand as a foundational landmark."" --Ralph M. Rosen, PhD, Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA"

If we spend the time to dig deeply into the rhetoric of medicine over time, as the authors Nicholson and Selden have done, we find the motivations of early doctors, their foibles and how they perceived themselves. It is an incredibly rich story with lessons around money, competition and autonomy for doctors and for the patients they serve. --Sanjay Gupta, MD, Staff Neurosurgeon, The Emory Clinic, Atlanta, GA, Chief Medical Correspondent, CNN Nicholson and Selden offer a pioneering rejoinder to the persistent estrangement of classics and modern medicine. Acutely sensitive to cultural difference, the authors leverage the temporal and technological gulf between ancient Greek and modern American medicine to construct a nuanced and productive juxtaposition: by exposing the fault lines in the self-representation of ancient Greek doctors across an array of key issues, they generate new ways for the American physician to perceive and confront modern counterparts to these very tensions. This is a rare hybrid of a book that couples accessible but consummate expertise of the ancient material with concrete insights for practicing doctors. --Margaret Foster, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN In this remarkable and wise book, a noted scholar of Ancient Greece and a leading medical educator illuminate several themes that bind together the stories we have told one another across two thousand years of history; the rhetoric that shapes conflicting views of major economic, social, and ethical issues common to the experience of physicians and patients in the age of Hippocrates; and those that still bedevil us in the contemporary era of modern medicine and technology. Practicing physicians, hospital administrators, and those who teach humanistic courses in Narrative Medicine and History of Science are among the many who will find The Rhetoric of Medicine a critical text for promoting the wellness of today's doctors and their patients. --Michael Salcman, MD, Former Chair of Neurosurgery, University of Maryland, editor of Poetry in Medicine and special lecturer in the Osher Institute at Towson University, Towson, MD This unique and timely collaboration between a classicist and a physician re-connects cultural and rhetorical threads between ancient and modern medicine... There were good scientific reasons for medicine to modernize itself at the time, of course, but as this study shows, much was also lost in this wholesale break from its ancient tradition. By examining the rhetoric of Greek doctors as they contemplated (e.g., their relationship with patients, their own embodiment or their responsibilities as professional caregivers), Nicholson and Selden make a compelling case that medicine of our own time would benefit from a similarly self-conscious approach to how doctors talk about themselves and their profession... Within programs in medical humanities and bioethics in particular, this book will stand as a foundational landmark. --Ralph M. Rosen, PhD, Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Author Information

Nigel Nicholson, PhD is the Walter Mintz Professor of Classics and Dean of the Faculty at Reed College in Portland, OR. His research focuses on ancient Greece, specifically Greek athletics, Greek Sicily and Italy, and Greek medicine. He is the author of Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West (Oxford University Press, 2016), and also edited a special Paedagogus Section for Classical World in 2015 on Literary Theory in Graduate and Undergraduate Classics Curricula. He served as President of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest in 2006 and was named Oregon's Professor of the Year for 2005 by the Carnegie Foundation. Nathan R. Selden, MD, PhD is Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery and holds the Mario and Edith Campagna Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. He is also Chair-elect of the OHSU Professional Board. In his clinical practice, he cares for children with complex brain and spinal disorders and performed the first surgical transplantation of neuronal stem cells in the world. He is currently Secretary of the Society of Neurological Surgeons and is past-President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. In 2013, he received the Parker-Palmer Courage to Teach Award from the U.S. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

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