Product Description

Heirs of General Practice is a frieze of glimpses of young doctors with patients of every age—about a dozen physicians in all, who belong to the new medical specialty called family practice. They are people who have addressed themselves to a need for a unifying generalism in a world that has become greatly subdivided by specialization, physicians who work with the “unquantifiable idea that a doctor who treats your grandmother, your father, your niece, and your daughter will be more adroit in treating you.”

These young men and women are seen in their examining rooms in various rural communities in Maine, but Maine is only the example. Their medical objectives, their successes, the professional obstacles they do and do not overcome are representative of any place family practitioners are working. While essential medical background is provided, McPhee’s masterful approach to a trend significant to all of us is replete with affecting, and often amusing, stories about both doctors and their charges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #410499 in Books
• Published on: 1986-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

Review
“A sensitive portrayal of the heart of family medicine—the personal relationships between family physicians, their patients and families—and an accurate representation of the special challenges of family practice and the reasons for its recent renaissance.”—John P. Geyman, M.D., chairman, Department of Family Medicine, University of Washington and editor, Journal of Family Practice
-- Review

Review

About the Author
John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.

Customer Reviews

First rate McPhee
A former student sent me this book after her first year in medical studies and said "finally someone who tells it like it is". Definitely NOT about urban Medibusiness or the world of HMOS and doctors too busy to doctor, instead McPhee focuses on the lives and work of young doctors in rural Maine, bringing us their story and that of their patients with compassion and without either the cloying sentimentality or the muck-raking zeal that sometimes clogs this topic. A quick read & well worth it.

A missed opportunity?
I come from a family of general practitioners - my mother was a G.P. and my sister followed in her footsteps - and I am a fan of John McPhee's writing, in general. So I expected to like this book more than I actually did. The book follows the standard McPhee schema - in-depth reporting on a very specific topic, in this case doctors who choose to work as general practitioners. McPhee provides vignettes of a dozen or so such doctors, almost all of them working in Maine.

McPhee is usually very effective in working from the specific to reach more general insights, and it is clear that he would like to do the same here. That is, by focusing on doctors who have opted out of the mainstream, he would like to illuminate some general truths about the practice of mainstream medicine. However, I think his success in doing so is limited, rarely rising above statement of the obvious. By focusing his microscope only on family practitioners working in Maine, the generalizability of any lessons they might offer is questionable. The needs of communities in Maine cannot be considered particularly representative of the U.S. in general.

So the book never really becomes anything more than a series of isolated vignettes of some individual 'maverick' doctors. Which is interesting as far as it goes, but I wish McPhee had been able to do more with the material. By the end I felt that an opportunity had been missed to write a book that would have been of greater general interest.

I am in this book on page 87
This book has its good and bad points. McPhee is an excellent writer, and the piece originally appeared in The New Yorker Magazine. I worked at the hospital in Skowhegan at the time he was in town to do his research, and it is extremely well done in that respect. I appear in it on page 87. As a paeon to family practice physicians in general, this is a sort of a manifesto to describe the lifestyle that an MD can have, and yes, there is an alternative to the insurance-driven practice style that doctors get into if they stay in an urban area.

This book also describes the Maine lifestyle led by many back-to-the-land people as they mixed in with the yankee Mainers of the region. Maine (particularly the part North or east of Augusta) is a place which has maintained a distinctive way of life, unlike so much of the rest of the USA.

I am older now, and there are parts of this book which seem so quaint - it took place during the Reagan era, prior to the introduction of DRGs, prior to the budget cuts of 1984, again in 1878, and yet again the 1990s. The small hospitals in Maine, seventeen out of the forty hospitals, have all been forced to downsize and refocus on outpatient care. And many of the docs described have moved on to other avenues of medicine, away from the youthful idealism.

I decided to write this review when my second daughter called me up to say that she had read the book when a high school freind lent it to her. the high school freind is in med school and had received it as a gift. It's great that we can perpatuate the myth of the old time GP...... maybe the younger generation will be inspired by this yet again.....