Death of the Good Doctor -- Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic

Product Description

A woman physician's memoir of working with AIDS patients during the early HIV epidemic in Northern California

Dr. Kate Scannell abandoned her academic career in 1985 expecting to enter an "ordinary" medical practice in Northern California. Instead, the thirty-two-year-old physician found herself assigned to an Alameda county hospital's AIDS ward where much of the medicine she had studied over many difficult years was rendered irrelevant.

Working with AIDS patients, nearly all of whom were dying, Scannell discovered the inadequacy of the "good doctor" who battles illness to keep patients alive regardless of their suffering. By embracing her patients’ unique needs and stories, Scannell reached an expanded understanding of her patients and of herself as a physician.

Death of the Good Doctor richly chronicles the intimacy of Scannell’s relationships with her patients through whom the vast complexities of the AIDS epidemic are uniquely focused. It is through these beautiful, often difficult, and sometimes humorous portraits that the woman and the physician discover each other.

Acclaim for Death of the Good Doctor—Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic

"This haunting memoir is an important addition to the canon of AIDS literature. Scannell writes beautifully and with an insight that escapes most physicians."
—Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and Cutting for Stone

“Kate Scannell is the rare doctor who has been transformed by her patients. In this irresistible, informative, and enormously moving book, she tells us not only her own story, but theirs.”
—Gloria Steinem

“When Kate Scannell began work with AIDS patients in 1985, her idea of a good doctor was one who saved lives, not lost them, one who used state-of-the-art technological intervention to battle disease no matter the cost. Now, in an enormously moving, thoughtful and compassionate memoir, she recounts how she discarded her traditional medical training and learned how to rely on her own sensibilities. ...The individuals that she met on the ward, she writes, ‘shook me, stunned me, alarmed me, twisted me, righted me, tricked me, and amazed me.’ Their stories do the same for us, and some even make us laugh.”
—Minneapolis Star/Tribune

“In a series of essays, she offers haunting portraits of the men and women she served—and of herself, as she learns to recognize and grapple with her own anger, grief, comfort, and joy. … Scannell’s writing is direct, at times deceptively simple, and often moving. … This is a rich collection of snapshots not only of people with AIDS but of the journey of their physician. Scannell’s need to write the stories of her patients is also shadowed by her knowledge that, before she finished writing these stories, she herself had been diagnosed with cancer.”
—Felice Aull, Medical Humanities, New York University

“Somewhere in the Introduction I was hooked, and well before the end of the first chapter I was thanking heaven, or at least my editor, for my good luck ... to experience the remarkable characters who people this history of the early years of the plague. Scannell is a writer. [The] stories are stunning, the lives they tell memorable and important. Scannell [knows] just when to insert her own feelings and experiences in the narrative. ... DOTGD is a remarkable book, part history, part memoir, that reads with the grace and elegance of good fiction. ... Scannell writes with wit and sensitivity.”
—Bay Area Reporter

“Her storytelling style allows the reader to put a face on the epidemic and give meaning to the statistics.”
—Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care

Publication History

Originally published in paperback 1999, Cleis Press; then out of print. Rights reverted to the author in 2010 and the book was released in electronic format. It was back in print 2012, with photographs added in 2018.

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