Ebook: White Coat Ways: A History of Medical Traditions and Their Battle With Progress
Author: Brian Elliott
- Language: English
- epub
Description
White coats, Hippocratic oaths, medicine as a calling – are these beneficial practices or harmful rituals? White Coat Ways traces seven medical traditions from their historical origins to their contemporary issues. Tracing these origins through common misconceptions – who really wrote the Hippocratic oath, are hospitals nonprofit – empowers the reader to approach contemporary controversies accurately. The stories along the way provide an intertwining history of foundational figures like Hippocrates, Joseph Lister, and Renee Laennec to downright bizarre stories of extraordinary mathematicians and goat testicle implantation.Early Reviews
"With eloquent prose and fascinating historical citations, Dr. Elliott paints a remarkable picture of the history of our medical traditions and how they came to be. White Coat Ways is a must-read for every medical resident wanting to understand why they do what they do."-Dr. Larry Istrail, Physician & Author of The POCUS Manifesto
"On the eleventh page of White Coat Ways, after describing the history of normal saline (a medical intervention so universal you’ll find it being administered in almost every hospital room) Dr. Elliott writes the following: “Who cares about the history of a glorified bag of salt water? Well, the themes in this story allude to the important concepts in medical tradition. One is that ubiquity breeds complacency.”
Medical training is many things. It is certainly a privilege. For many, it is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It is simultaneously grueling and rewarding. It is also an acculturation process: an adjustment to rules, expectations, taboos, and traditions rooted in several thousand years’ worth of history. Throughout medical school and residency training, we mold our appearance, vocabulary, and actions to fit within the culture of medicine. It seems like before we have a moment to take a breath and think critically about who we’re becoming, we’ve all but internalized these traditions.
Enter White Coat Ways. In the book, Dr. Elliott takes his readers on a tour of phenomena critical to the identity of the modern physician. His evidence-based approach to the appraisal of pillars of medicine such as physical examinations, white coats, and the Hippocratic oath is refreshing. The book is well-researched and home to a plethora of amusing and illuminating historical anecdotes.
For better or worse, where we’ve been informs where we are going. I encourage all physicians to read White Coat Ways, but especially those of us who have asked why we do something a certain way in medicine and were met with an answer along the lines of “that’s the way it has always been done.” Ubiquity breeds complacency. We can keep blindly idealizing our historical heroes and the institutions they built or learn from our past and try to do better."
-Tricia Pendergrast @trpender
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