Attending Others: A Doctor's Education in Bodies and Words

Becoming a doctor requires years of formal education but one learns the practice of medicine only through direct encounters with the fragile others called patients. Pediatrician Brian Volck recounts his own education in the mysteries of suffering bodies powerful words and natural beauty. Its a curriculum where the best teachers are children and their mothers the classrooms are Central American villages and desert landscapes and the essential texts are stories poems and paintings. Through practices of focused attention he grows from detached observer of his patients lives into an uneasy witness and grateful companion. From the inner city to the Navajo Nation and from the Grand Canyon to the mountains of Honduras Volck learns to listen to children unable to talk to assist in healing when cure is impossible and to love those whose life and experiences are radically different from his own. This is not a how-to book or a brief for reforming medical education. Attending Others is a highly personal account of what the author learned about medicine after he completed his formal education. The short answer it turns out is pretty much everything. Your medical education and practice have taught you the art of learning stories. By schooling better known to you than me you have acquired the art of telling the stories you have learned. As a story-teller you are an excellent artist. I know this because you are able to reveal in no more words than necessary not only how you do your work but more importantly why. --Wendell Berry from a letter to the author Brian Volcks stories are not just about medical life though medicine is his profession his vocation and a frame and focus of the stories that make up this rich memoir. Attending Others refers to much more than medical care in these stories about learning to live among and love a Navajo community in New Mexico rural folk in Honduras and urbanites in Baltimore and Cincinnati. The attention Volck pays is deeply relational informed by complex resilient family life and a mindful openhearted spirituality that draws him to the desert in whose silence he weaves words into life-giving stories about those who have been his teachers as he attended them. He invites his readers into a vision of healing and wholeness that begins and ends in resilient humor and deep humility. --Marilyn McEntyre Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program; Author of Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out and Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies We have lately seen a number of excellent writers who are doctors. Perhaps because a doctor must find words to give us when we are most broken and in need of encouragement the best have learned the healing art of words. Dr. Brian Volck joins their company with this glorious memoir. --Richard Rodriguez Author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography Attending Others is a tour de force a page-turner that poses complex and fascinating questions. It reads like an astonishing account from a strange country: the inner life of an attending physician as he chooses medicine faces the first cadaver and goes on to train and practice. With humility and humor Volck commands both the idioms of medicine and the lyricism of poets. He confesses to flashes of fear but also to moving moments when the icy distance that lies between doctors and patients has melted. The practice of medicine often restores people to health as Volcks memoir reveals but medicine can also fail. Even then as Volck points out a doctor has something significant to offer: We gave them all we could he writes our time our presence our attention. --Jeanne Murray Walker Author of The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimers Part memoir part meditation and all heartbreakingly and beautifully evocative Attending Others is a very rare book indeed. This is a st