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Book Review
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Volume 330:296-297 January 27, 1994 Number 4
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Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel

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Edited by Howard M. Spiro, Mary G. McCrea Curnen, Enid Peschel, and Deborah St. James. 199 pp. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1993. $20. ISBN 0-300-05840-3.

This collection of 15 essays, almost exclusively by physicians, explores the nature of empathy, how it affects the lives of physicians and patients, and (especially) how it can be taught and nurtured as a part of medical education.

Empathy has been so neglected and misunderstood in the field of medicine that the adequacy of a new book on the subject can be tested in large part by its success in explaining and overcoming two fallacies. The no-transference fallacy holds that faculty members can treat students like scum and they will nevertheless grow up to be compassionate physicians. The idiot-with-the-stethoscope fallacy . . . [Full Text of this Article]




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