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Review

“Irresistible, informative and enormously moving.” —Gloria Steinem

Kate Scannell abandoned her academic career in 1985 to enter an ordinary medical practice in Northern California. Instead, the thirty-two-year-old physician found herself assigned to a county hospital AIDS ward where much of the medicine she has studied over many difficult years is rendered irrelevant.

Working with AIDS patients, nearly all of whom are dying, Scannell discovers the inadequacy of the “good” doctor who battles illness to keep patients alive regardless of their suffering. By embracing her patients' need for compassion and healing, Scannell reaches an expanded understanding of her patients and of herself as a physician.

Buy this book $14.95 Trade paper 196 pages 5.25 X 8 ISBN: 1-57344-091-4 Women’s Studies / Medicine / Memoir The Death of the Good Doctor richly chronicles the intimacy of Scannell’s relationships with her patients — through whom the vast complexities of the epidemic are uniquely focused. Scannell writes not only as a physician but as a woman who entered medical school having never seen a woman physician and who, at midlife, now faces ovarian cancer. It is through these beautiful, often difficult, and sometimes humorous portraits that the woman and the physician discover each other. Kate Scannell has practiced medicine for twenty years. She served as Clinical Director of AIDS Programs at Fairmont Hospital, a public facility serving Alameda County, California, from 1985 to 1990. Scannell is board certified in Internal Medicine, Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, and Geriatrics. She is Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Scannell was thirty-two years old when she arrived on Oakland’s Fairmont Hospital AIDS ward. She was born in a county hospital to an Irish-Catholic family with twelve children. She had entered medical school at the Michigan State University in 1976 having never before seen a female physician. She completed her internship and residency at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, University of Chicago, where she was designated Chief Resident in 1983. She completed her postdoctoral research and clinical fellowship in rheumatology and clinical immunology at the University of California, San Francisco in 1985. Since then, she has worked as Attending Staff Physician, San Francisco General Hospital; Assistant Clinical Professor, Internal Medicine, Univrsity of California, San Francisco; Clinical Director, HIV/AIDS Services, Fairmont Hospital, San Leandro, CA; and Internist and Rheumatologist, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA. Scannell has published in the JOURNAL OF ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROMES, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, HEALTHLINE, CLINICAL AND INVESTIGATIVE MEDICINE, SURGICAL NEUROLOGY, ARCHIVES OF DERMATOLOGY, CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RHEUMATOLOGY, ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, AND CHEST. She has been affiliated with the International AIDS Society, Burroughs Wellcome HIV Treatment Advisory Panel, San Francisco Community Consortium, American Society of Clinical Pathologists, Doctors Without Borders, Physicians for Human Rights, American College of Physicians, United Scleroderma Foundation, Arthritis Foundation, Psoriasis Foundation, American College of Rheumatology, American Medical Women’s Association, Kaiser Ethics Committee, California Medical Association, Kaiser Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, and Sjogren’s Syndrome Foundation.