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To get to my body, my doctor has to get to my character. He has to go through my soul.
The Publishing World, of late, has seen an upsurge in the genre of so-called narrative medicine, the physician as raconteur of his or her own experience. From The New York Times, where one finds weekly writings about patient-doctor relationships, to The New Yorker essayists and authors Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman, along with a host of newcomers on the scene, there is no shortage of doctors exploring the mysteries of making complicated diagnoses, recommending treatment options, coping with professional and personal challenges, and—interacting intimately and empathically with ill patients.
Now, here is artist and psychoanalyst David Newman, one of our own, coming at the medical narrative from the opposite perspective—that of the patient. In this reflective and often disturbing book, Talking with Doctors, Newman, a supervisor and faculty member of the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, gives us a harrowing account of his own out-of-the blue diagnosis of a highly aggressive and potentially terminal brain tumor and the treatment he sought for survival.
From the shock of the opening—“In early September 1999 I was told I had a large, malignant, life-threatening tumor in the center of my skull” (p. 1)—we are taken on the roller-coaster ride of Newman's journey,