On this week’s show, Dr. Terrence Holt, author of Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories visits with Writing and Humanities Program Director Jason Lewis, and students Cole Cheney, Ethan Forsgren, Aline Sandouk, and a studio audience. Dr. Holt is a geriatrician at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  His book is about residency, and is an exploration of how doctors find the compassion and strength to care about their work and patients.  The first chapter,  “A Sign of Weakness,” takes us through an inexperienced doctor’s confrontation of his own helplessness against the impending death of his patient.  You may want to read it before you listen. (Look for the link below the audio player.)

 Dr. Holt has a lot to offer med students in terms of wisdom.  How having a deep and thoughtful appreciation of your own humanity helps If you’re going to practice medicine humanely.  The role doubt plays in the life of a doc, and the fact that If you’re not having doubt multiple times in the course of a day, you’re not paying close enough attention.  The things that keep him going as a doctor and as a writer. How the connection between writer and reader gives writers advantages that other kinds of artists may not have. And using literature as a way of getting the kinds of experience that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

Episode 048: A Doctor’s Story with Terrence Holt

Excerpt: Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories, “A Sign of Weakness”

Excerpted from Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories by Terrence Holt. Copyright © 2014 by Terrence Holt. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved

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The opinions expressed in this feed and podcast are not those of the University of Iowa or the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.