When A Doctor Hates A Patient

When a Doctor Hates a Patient: And Other Chapters in a Young Physician’s Life by Richard E. Peschel and Enid Rhodes Peschel offers an unflinching look at the emotional, ethical, and human dimensions of medical training. Drawing on Richard Peschel’s early clinical experiences, the book presents vivid case histories that capture the extraordinary pressures young doctors face: relentless hours, overwhelming responsibility, immersion in suffering and death. These narratives reveal how physicians learn to intellectualize pain in order to function scientifically—yet risk losing touch with the humanity of their patients and with their own inner lives. Paired with carefully chosen literary parallels by Enid Rhodes Peschel, each case invites reflection on how language, story, and imagination can illuminate the dilemmas of modern medicine.

The Peschels situate these stories within a broader critique of contemporary medical education, which prioritizes technical mastery while neglecting the humane. By turning to literature—from the Greeks to Virginia Woolf—they show how language and narrative foster empathy, sharpen perception, and rehumanize encounters between doctor and patient. In an age of technological triumphs and ethical crises—from life-support machines to genetic engineering—the book argues that medicine must draw as deeply on the humanities as on science. At once candid memoir, literary meditation, and call for reform, When a Doctor Hates a Patient demonstrates how stories—both clinical and literary—can help heal the dehumanizing rift between medicine as science and medicine as the lived experience of suffering, care, and compassion.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.