Why This Book is Needed

Coming to Medicine: Empathy Through Short Stories fills a critical need in medical education, both for students and for the educated public. It is 80,000 words long and includes fifty short stories carefully organized to share medicine, as an art, based on my extensive experience.

Medicine has been an art longer than it has been a science, but the art is increasingly endangered. This art of medicine includes the interrelated skills of empathy, compassion, and communication. In a modern healthcare system focused on efficiency and profitability, these skills are easily lost.  Their practice now faces existential danger with the advent of artificial intelligence, as it threatens to add even more distance between physicians and their patients. 

As I have trained in both philosophy and medicine, I feel uniquely qualified to write this book. I finished my medical internship and neurology residencies at Vanderbilt. I have a masters degree in Philosophy of Public Policy from The London School of Economics. I have over ten years’ experience practicing neurology on the front lines of healthcare — in the emergency room and intensive care units of large academic hospitals, caring for the sickest patients. I have listened and reflected on the trials of healthcare providers, patients, and the people they love. I then took a graduate class through Harvard Extension School on writing short fiction, and I got busy writing and rewriting.  

Coming to Medicine includes the best of my stories. None of them have been previously published, as I have waited patiently to present them as parts of a collection. Taken together, they show the art of medicine sketched from different perspectives, encouraging the reader to imagine an abstract art as a concrete tool.

There is no other book like this one. While medical fiction has proven to be a popular genre in entertainment, it has been overlooked in education. This is a mistake: fiction is a powerful tool for teaching the art of medicine, starting with empathy. I hope to inject life into our tired profession, by administering art along with science — people before machines. As an active clinician and instructor, I have the authenticity needed to succeed.    

I hope you will see the value in Coming to Medicine, and I look forward to the possibility of working with you.

James Fleming, MD, MSc