The Good Doctor

Exquisitely insightful... The Good Doctor poses a fundamental riddle faced by every historian: How can we question the decisions and attitudes of our forebears without having experienced the contexts that shaped them? It makes for a particularly compelling discussion when the players are father and son, sharing as their lives' work an ethically charged, ever-changing profession. -- New York Times Barron Lerner's marvelous book--a deeply intimate story about his father and the practice of medicine--touches on some of the most profound issues in medicine today: autonomy, medical wisdom, empathy, paternalism and the evolving roles of the doctor and patient. This is one of the most thoughtful and provocative books that I have read in a long time, and I suspect that generations of doctors and patients will find it just as thought provoking. --Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies The Good Doctor is a lovely book and a loving book; it's a book about medicine and family and ethics and history which embraces complexity and speaks to all those subjects with wide-ranging compassion and great good sense. And it's a father-son doctor saga with much to say about the healing power of story and understanding. --Perri Klass, MD, author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure and The Mercy Rule An absolutely compelling treatise on bioethics told thru the lens of a physician's relationship with his physician father. If you want to understand the modern state of ethics in medicine, read this book. --Mehmet Oz, MD, Professor and Vice Chair, Surgery NY Presbyterian/Columbia A heartwarming story about a father-son doctor duo spanning a century, exquisitely showing the evolution of medical practice from antibiotics through bioethics. A small gem of a book. --Samuel Shem, MD, author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place From the Hardcover edition.