Attending Children: A Doctor's Education
Margaret E. Mohrmann, M.D., Ph.D. ι Georgetown University Press 2005
Excerpts from Published Reviews
JAMA 2005, 294: pp. 2504-2505
Attending Children: A Doctor’s Education ... deserves a special place in the library of each and every medical professional who cares for children of all ages. Although the focus is on the author’s patients, the book is also a spare and elegant memoir of a remarkable physician. The luminous quality of her writing is rare in medicine and rivals the best writers in the English language. Mohrmann’s examination of her own development as an engaged and attentive physician is uncompromising and powerful.
... Writing elegantly in a clear voice, this gifted writer has sifted her experience like sand and found gold.
... What unfolds is a remarkable exposition of how the author developed her listening skills from attending to children with terminal illnesses. The honesty and clarity with which Mohrmann examines her [early] lack of skill, for example, in giving bad news to families, is exemplary ...
... It is a graceful testimony to the importance of engaging with families, rather than cultivating distance. She makes this point persuasively through her stories of families with complicated family dynamics.
Attending children and their families, by listening, accompanying, and waiting, has been Dr Mohrmann’s crucible. All who care for children are fortunate that she has shared her journey with us.
Sara C. McIntire, MD, Reviewer, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Literature and Medicine 2005, 24.2: 325-328
Not only does Margaret E. Mohrmann, in Attending Children: A Doctor's Education, discuss what it has been like to practice pediatrics over a career spent in academic medical centers, she also provides narratives that instruct medical students on how doctors learn to care for patients as opposed to how they acquire scientific knowledge ...
Mohrmann's writing is both scientific and literary. Information about the diseases affecting children is clearly presented, but there are also vivid physical descriptions of children...
... a much-needed book that demonstrates what it is like to attend to children so completely, even if it risks "allowing [the caregiver's] heart to be broken" because "the heart that can break, again and again, in the face of such suffering and grief becomes softer, more resilient, more capacious." There is much research being conducted in medical education to determine the best approach to facilitate knowledge acquisition and retention in adult learners, but I would suggest that medical students can benefit greatly from reading well-written narratives such as Mohrmann's. Many pages of this book deserve to be dog-eared by anyone who cares for children in the medical field, particularly medical educators who hope that their lessons live beyond the classroom and medical students who want to know what makes a good physician.
Joseph M. Geskey, Pennsylvania State University