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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Zen and the Art of Medicine, 25 April 2000
By A Customer
The best way I could describe this book is a mini Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for doctors. Rather as Pirsig used motorcycle maintenance as the practical expression of his philosophy, so Willis uses his professional experiences in general medical practice as the medium through which he comments upon contemporary life. Willis argues that the family doctor can stand as a metaphor for Everyman, and the job of the general physician as a model for life itself. This is philosophy as autobiography - a difficult trick to pull off, but here the result is a triumph. The starting point usually lies in stories of the author's experiences as a family doctor, and he moves from this concrete and grounded world towards a broad critique of some of the most important trends in contemporary life. His diagnosis is that the distinctive malaise of modem life in Western democracies is the problem of judgment and its legitimacy. Judgement is everywhere being denigrated and replaced with committees, regulations and market mechanisms. There is a conflict between the explicit, the managed and the procedural on one hand; and the implicit, the autonomous and the improvised on the other hand. Willis suggests that one root cause of this malaise is the application of 'media scale' analyses to everyday life. The problems of actual medical practice have a human scale of risks and benefits which bear almost no relationship to the 'hyper-real' world of sensational mishaps and miracles we experience through television and newspapers. We swim in an 'ocean of congruity' but notice only the occasional islands of incongruity. Practising good medicine at its proper scale is incompatible with the imperatives of mass journalism. Willis also has a real gift, of a Chestertonian kind, for highlighting the miracle of the mundane. I particularly liked his tale of a blissfully free Saturday which began with an oppressive list of jobs and conflicts of priorities - and ended, totally unexpectedly, as dedicated to fixing an old door lock. This was, as it turned out, the best possible use of time - satisfying, useful, and impossible to predict. Without the space for lock-fixing, life will be lost in its living.
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