Crawshaw examines compassion in the practice of medicine and our everyday world against the backdrop of suffering as an inescapable element of human experience. Calling upon a breadth of disciplines and intersections with leaders in his field, his insightful journey will delight the reader whether he takes on the neglected sense of smell or lights into the greed of the pharmaceutical companies. In the chapter "Oh, Where is the Balm of Gilead?" Crawshaw writes: "I expect to enter my dotage with a vengeance, devoting my final years and energies to a lost scientific cause. What Linus Pauling did for Vitamin C, I plan to do for the therapeutic effects of odors. Yes, I believe the right smell heals. Although odor therapy is perhaps a lost cause, as neglected as the rhinencephalon itself, I plan to raise a cry among the brethren and, if nothing more, a stink upon the wards."
A sampling of chapter headings illustrate the breadth of Crawshaw’s uncommon expression: "A Lesson from Chinese Medicine," "Fee for Service from the Poor," "An Epidemic of Suicide among Physicians on Probation," "The National Health Selective Disservice," "The Better Health Business Bureau," "They all Laughed When I Spoke of Greedy Doctors," "African Slavery and Western Medicine," "Nurturing Hate in Psychotherapy," and more.
His amazing story-telling ability takes the reader from bedpans, lepers, and Chinese medicine to doctor suicides, airborne waifs, and threatening KGB agents. While some essays clearly address physicians, none is laden with medical jargon. Crawshaw writes of his concern for ensuring the inclusion of compassion in medical education, health care decisions, and social policymaking, as he cautions, "Beware of social efficiency bereft of reflection that treats compassion as an optional benefit rather than an essential need."
Now retired, Crawshaw is a psychiatrist and taught at the University of Oregon Medical School in addition to writing regular columns for The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and Portland Physician, and Journal of the American Medical Association. He has served on dozens of state and national committees serving the cause of improved health care, and was twice selected to be an exchange scholar in the USSR.
