Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D.
Book Reviews
Book Review: Firefly Racing with the Dolphins
Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D.
In this touching collection, Dr. Chalat Rajaram, a retired internist and specialist in hospice medicine with a string of impressive degrees, provides touching glimpses into his life and offers his philosophy of living for our consideration. His poetry speaks to the great love and adoration he had for his deceased wife and his great sorrow at her loss. Nevertheless, he consoles himself with memories of his beloved, who visits him still in dreams, whose spirit is always with him and whose values propel him to be a better person. Although gone, she walks beside him and illuminates his path in life. Despite the loss of his soulmate, he determines to go on “to face life, and go forward without fear” – this has always been the way of things; loss is built into life…
Quoted by Dr. Rajaram at UCI School of Medicine Schwartz Rounds, February 2024.
Book Review: I Hear Their Voices Singing
Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D.
Cortney Davis, the author of I Hear Their Voices Singing, is a nurse, and Daniel Becker, the author of 2nd Chance, is a physician. The commonalities and distinctions of their poetry are likely rooted in these professional realities. Given the similarity of their professional backgrounds, many of the themes the poets address at the deepest levels are comparable. Both are committed to healing—their patients, and themselves. Both are attuned to the omnipresence of suffering and death. Ultimately, both poets adopt a somewhat similar position from which to contemplate their surroundings. Their stance is compassionate yet detached. They look at the world with complete honesty and clarity and do not turn away from what they see.
Book Review: Center and Circumference
Johanna Shapiro PhD
Center and Circumference is a beautiful collection of poetry, divided into thematic segments, that create the perfect image of life, which has a core, and also all those things which surround and enclose that core. There are love poems to all sorts of beloveds that encompass great yearning, searching, a sense of near but missed connection; and then at times a glorious rejoicing in the other. One of the more optimistic poems Filament manages to find a new image for the age-old adage that the world is held together by love. In the moment of reading that poem, you believe it!
Book Review: Souls on a Walk: An Enduring Love Story Unbroken by Alzheimer’s
Johanna Shapiro PhD
Souls on a Walk is a moving firsthand account of a husband and wife’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease during the final chapter of their 56-year marriage. While similar in some respects to other accounts of caring for a significant other with Alzheimer’s, the memoir offers a unique dimension in that the author is a prominent academic family physician. Nevertheless, despite his medical expertise, Dr Geyman recounts the story of his wife, Gene Geyman, primarily from the perspective of a loving and caring husband.
Book Review: What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Danielle Ofri, MD Boston, Beacon Press, 2013 Reviewed by Johanna Shapiro, PhD Pharos 2014
Emotions in medicine are both a neglected and problematic subject. As internist and author Danielle Ofri observes in her new book What Doctors Feel, the model of detached concern is still prevalent in clinical practice and in training. As she writes, “the often unspoken (and sometimes spoken) message in the real-life trenches of medical training is that doctors shouldn’t get too emotionally involved with their patients.” p4 But what does this really mean? Medical education rarely addresses the emotions of learners, although research has documented an intense panoply of positive and negative emotions. Even outstanding physician role models rarely discuss their feelings, leaving medical students to attempt to deduce appropriately professional emotional responses from indirect verbal, nonverbal, and behavioral cues. The medical literature as a whole is surprisingly silent on this topic.
Book Review: Medicine and Humanistic Understanding: The Significance of Literature in Medical Practices
Johanna Shapiro, PhD
Literature and medicine have been inextricably intertwined since the time of the Greeks. Often, as in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein, literature has been concerned with the idea that science and technology threaten medicine’s humanistic heart. In the case of the DVD Medicine and Humanistic Understanding: The Significance of Literature in Medical Practice, we find technology in the service of literature and medical humanism, and it is a remarkably successful experiment, which enhances, enlivens, and inspirits the once-predictable academic text.
Book Review: Doctors in the Making
Johanna Shapiro, PhD
Reflective writing, subsumed under the umbrella of narrative medicine, is now widely recognized as a vehicle for cultivating a reflective practitioner, enhancing professionalism and humanistic qualities. Both Suzanne Poirier’s Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education and Johanna Shapiro’s The Inner World of Medical Students: Listening to Their Voices in Poetry are exemplary volumes providing evidence that capturing and interpreting the lived experience of doctoring through the written word can be a valuable tool in medical education. For students, Poirier asserts that “effective narrative writing can provide one of the most efficient routes to self-understanding” (169). For medical educators, these authors’ compilations and scholarly analyses of student and physician narratives help to illuminate core issues in medical education, including the developmental process of achieving a humanized professional identity. Poirier’s excerpt from the writings of a chief resident challenges the medical community with its directness: “There is a standard curriculum to teach the scientific component of medicine, there is, however PO standard curriculum to teach the emotional component.” These memoirs and poems speak for themselves, providing a compelling argument for attending to both the intellectual and emotional processes of becoming a physician: in essence, what Poirier has referred to as a “more healthful process of medical education” (94). Physician, heal thyself.
Book Review: The Doctor in Literature
Johanna Shapiro, PhD
The Doctor in Literature: Satisfaction or Resentment by Solomon Posen, a physician who taught general medicine and endocrinology at Sydney University for 30 years, is intended as a reference text that considers the representations of physicians in literature, “their attitudes and their activities.” The sheer scope of this work deserves acknowledgment. The book reviews approximately 600 works of literature, historical and contemporary, classics and popular fiction, and encompasses a time frame from the ancient G-reeks to contemporary novels. Notably, the book includes not only English language texts, but also pays extensive attention to works from France, Spain, and Germany. Further, this endeavor is conceived as a four volume series, with this volume focusing on doctor-patient interactions, and the others to address various other aspects such as the physician’s personal life, job satisfaction, and the portrayal of different kinds of specialists.
Book Review: Tales My Stethoscope Told Me
Johanna Shapiro, PhD
Tales My Stethoscope Told Me by Martin Duke, M.D., is a memoir of an eminent cardiologist’s noteworthy experiences with training, patient care, and colleaguial and family relationships. The author wishes to portray the “human.. .idealistic and romantic side” of a physician, and succeeds admirably in this task. Dr. Duke impresses the reader as an unassuming, somewhat whimsical man of great integrity, to whom we might safely entrust our hearts (or our stamp collection, a personal hobby of Dr. Duke’s). While medical students or residents might be interested in Duke’s tales, I suspect it will be fellow practitioners who most appreciate the perspective and humanism his long career has given him. Lay persons will be reassured that caring, compassionate physicians still exist.