Heirs of General Practice [Paperback]

John McPhee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1986

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Using the case method so familiar to doctors, John McPhee has captured the essence of the struggle within medicine to find a better balance between humane interest in patients as persons and the scientific rigor demanded by modern medicine. His portraits of young family doctors in Maine vividly portray the struggle of primary care to achieve this balance.” --Robert S. Lawrence, M.D., Charles S. Davidson Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

 

“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

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. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977.  In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World.  He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374519749
• ISBN-13: 978-0374519742
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More 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

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First rate McPhee, April 26, 2001

By 

John Anderson (Bar Harbor, ME USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heirs of General Practice (Paperback)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A missed opportunity?, May 3, 2008

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David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heirs of General Practice (Paperback)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars McPhee delves into doctors--it's both delightful and worrying, October 14, 2011

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Duncan Brown "Duncan Brown" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heirs of General Practice (Paperback)

John McPhee is one of the best non-fiction writers active today. In "Heirs of General Practice" he delves deeply into the General Practice movement in American medicine. In his deft, insightful way he gives us a clear view of what it means to be a general practitioner in a country that rewards specialists more highly, even though what U.S. medicine desperately needs are more doctors in General Practice.