The Renewal of Generosity
Illness, Medicine, and How to Live
166 pages
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5-1/2 x 8-1/2
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© 2004
Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine—generosity toward others and to themselves.
The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process.
The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.
The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process.
The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.
Royal Society of Canada: Lynch Medal in Bioethics
Won
"Frank's vision of how a lost sense of story could be restored to medicine is both lucid and profound.... In his new book, The Renewal of Generosity, he examines clinical situations in which health care workers who do bring a sense of narrative to bear have transformative effects."
"The Renewal of Generosity seeks to have patients seen less often as objects, to have their stories listened to and valued--by everyone. Each patient, Frank says, is a "moral presence." Such ideas are uplifting, especially when the reality is that some of the most caring professionals struggle under overwhelming, heavy caseloads. But one wants to believe that a total revolution in thought and compassion is possible, and Frank is to be thanked for keeping our eyes on this goal."
"Frank's desire to reinfuse medicine with generosity and genuine dialogue is to be admired. . . . Frank argues that doctors and patients must move to a point where narratives can be actively, openly discussed, compared, and acknowledged, but not necessarily assimilated or finalized. . . . [This book] does not end this debate, but it does add another voice and perspective to this important and ongoing dialogue within medicine."
"This reflection is starkly honest and never pedantic or condescending. Not only is it rich with both clinical and psychological detail, but it is filled with sensitive portraits of the complexities of meaning involved in the care of patients. . . .Through a rich telling of stories and reflection on them, Frank conducts a complex symphony of ideas about medicine with writing from a wide range of authors that models how readers might enact and experience the complex, subtle meaning of generosity and gratitude in their own practices. . . . Physicians should rush to read this book, and I hope that patients will join them."<George J. Agich, New England Journal of Medicine>
"The Renewal of Generosity should be of interest to clinicians seeking a deeper understanding of the impact of their relationships with their patients, and how those relationships contribute to their growth as human beings, and their ability to alleviate suffering and truly heal the ill. The stories in the book will resonate with personal memories of clinicians, evoking their own experiences with patients. . . . They will also learn how relationships with patients can serve as a paradigm for how we know ourselves and others, and how we use that knowledge in all of our relationships."
“Arthur Frank enacts the transformative powers of dialogue, alterity, generosity, and joy, not only in illness and medicine but in life. Daring to be porous to ideas and exposed to stories, Frank becomes his reader’s medium, summoning into earthy presence Marcus Aurelius, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, and many patients and doctors and nurses. What a method! This book is a breathtaking achievement that justifies our work in narrative medicine and grants us knowledge of what is at stake in it. It inaugurates a new stage in medical ethics and literature and medicine, beyond empathy and humanism into the bones of truth, the gift of moral participation, and the courage of being.”<
“The Renewal of Generosity explores how the medical profession has failed to recognize and address the crises of its own demoralization. Arthur Frank focuses on the moral lives of patients struggling with illness and on the moral lives of health-care providers caught amid conflicting demands. The telling and sharing of stories, he argues, can be a powerful means to register and to resist discouragement in a fast-changing medical environment. This probing book constitutes another important milestone in Frank’s personal and professional encounter with illness and its stories.”
"Drawing on a lifetime of experiences and reflections, Frank poignantly foregrounds the moral concerns of individuals coping with illness and providers caught amid competing and clashing narratives. Frank writes with clarity and raw honesty, and he invites readers to discover what it means to be generous in the particular physiological, material, and social moments of their lives."
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Hospitable Welcome
1. Lost in the Tunnel
2. The Dialogical Stoic
3. The Generosity of the Ill
4. Physicians' Generosity
5. "So that I can carry on"
6. Unfinalized Generosity
Notes
Index
Introduction
A Hospitable Welcome
1. Lost in the Tunnel
2. The Dialogical Stoic
3. The Generosity of the Ill
4. Physicians' Generosity
5. "So that I can carry on"
6. Unfinalized Generosity
Notes
Index
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