Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey With the Poor

by David Hilfiker M.D.

Overview

"A powerful report of the experiences of a physician living and practicing medicine in the inner city ... A deeply disturbing picture of the degradation of ghetto life and a painfully honest account of one man's attempt to do something about it." - Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466802919
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/01/2004
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	299 KB

About the Author

David Hilfiker, M.D., is the author of Not All of Us Are Saints.

Editorial Reviews

Hilfiker tells of the six years he and his family spent in Christ House, a church-based clinic and shelter for the poor in inner-city Washington. He describes the various medical and social problems the men he treated and let live in the house for up to a month presented, and he reports how a brief trial with women residents failed. The medical parts of the book are relatively easy to take; the unsettling parts are those questioning self, society, and life. For Hilfiker worries that he simply projects his own self-destructiveness, indecisiveness, rage, and guilt on his patients and his family. A good example of such ruminations comes in his account of his daughter Laurel and her dental braces: Should she be given money for this essentially cosmetic device when the poor don't have even the basic essentials? This is not a comfortable book, but it is an important addition to the literature of contemporary life in the rich global power that the U.S. is.

William Beatty