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Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital
by Eric Manheimer
"Manheimer offers a window onto a unique hospital and the wisdom of a healer who tends with equal skill to patients and the world." - Publishers Weekly
In the spirit of Oliver Sacks Awakenings and the TV series House, Dr. Eric Manheimer's Twelve Patientsis a memoir from the Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital that uses the plights of twelve very different patients - from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners from Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons - to illustrate larger societal issues. Manheimer is not only the medical director of the country's oldest public hospital, but he is also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer, and he is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.
"Starred Review... not recommended for the medically squeamish An exquisite - and often exquisitely depressing - patchwork of joy and pain." - Kirkus Reviews
"For anyone seeking to understand medicine from the patient perspective, Twelve Patients is a must-read. Dr. Manheimer eloquently describes life and experiences inside a major public hospital in twenty-first century America. Particularly poignant are the stories that highlight the complex inter-relationship between the mind and the body and how our feelings and those of our patients dramatically affect medical outcomes." - Carol A. Bernstein, MD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
"I sat down to read this book and found myself still up at 3 in the morning unable to put it down. Manheimer has the gift of perspectives - from the body language and silences of a family hiding a violent past to the global economic and political forces gradually suffocating our ability to care for our patients. What are the ends of medicine? What are the ends of a society? These are the questions tackled here, and answered, too." - Diane E. Meier, MD Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care
This information about Twelve Patients was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eric Manheimer, MD was the medical director at Bellevue from 1997-2012 and is a Clinical Professor at the New York University School of Medicine. He is an Internist who trained at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York in Internal Medicine. Following his Chief Residency there, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire where he was a member of Dartmouth Medical School and the Hitchcock Clinic for many years.
He has had a long interest in international health working in Haiti and Pakistan and in medical anthropology, history, the social sciences and literature particularly of Latin America. Along with his wife Diana Taylor, who is a University Professor at New York University, Eric travels extensively in Latin America and Mexico. He has two children and two grandchildren, both of whom were born at Bellevue.
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