Madeleine Meldin, M.D., is the pseudonym of a senior psychiatrist. Owing to the special nature of her clinical work, Dr. Meldin has chosen to remain anonymous until she retires from practice.
The Tender Bud is a tender account of human proportion of the experience of breast cancer by a sensitive, sophisticated psychiatrist whose warm psychotherapeutic style enriches her life and ours. She illuminates the spirit's trial by fire from the cancer, its personal and social meanings, and the even more threatening treatment. It is the author's extraordinary eye for the telling details of everyday lived experience of suffering that is her chief gift to her audience, along with the grace of the person who emerges from the simple and direct prose. I wanted to meet her at the end. I wanted to tell her that her illness narrative had affected me, had made me come to know someone admirable in adversity, someone I would like to know as a friend when I am in adversity. Perhaps it is, after all, the tender mercies of the psychotherapeutically informed like that will save us, sentenced as we are to existential terminality in a banal bureaucratic culture. This book is a gift from the heart that deserves many friends. - Arthur Kleinman, M.D., Harvard Medical School