Top 10 Doctor-Writers

aka Ten Doctor Writers Everyone Should Read Let me just start by acknowledging that top 10 lists are: absurd, biased, intriguing, powerful, useless, helpful, and ubiquitous – depending of course on the topic, its author, and you, its reader. Some of this author’s...

Food, Songs, and Stories

I love food: how it looks and how it tastes, that when done well it relies on science and requires art, how it’s both essential to life and one of the life’s great pleasures, that it embodies cultures and family traditions, and how easily it communicates...

Telling Stories About Patients & Doctors

It’s now been 3 weeks, 3 days, and 33 hours since the launch of A History of the Present Illness and so far it seems that the book and its message are both resonating with patients and doctors, readers and writers, which is to say, it seems to be resonating with...

The Op-Ed

The Op-Ed is an interesting beast, not least because that shorthand is often thought to mean “opinion or editorial” when in fact it means “opposite the editorial page” (on that perhaps dying artifact known as a newspaper), and as it turns out...

Book Passage: A Photo Essay

 It was a beautiful winter Sunday in San Francisco as we crossed the bridge to Marin…  The store in Corte Madera is huge and includes a cafe, a great reading space… and so many BOOKS… Of course, I was there to read from A History of the Present...