Editorial : From Publishers Weekly As a doctor of the oldest old, those patients over 85, San Antonio, Tex., geriatric physician Winakur cares for the fastest growing demographic segment of our society. He also had to usher his own aged father through the last painful, debilitating years of his life, when he slipped into dementia and became a stranger to himself and his family. In this affecting, thoughtfully composed memoir, Winakur remembers his father as he fully was, a gifted artist whose Depression-era mother would not allow him to go to art school. He was consigned to run the family's pawnshop in Baltimore until the race riots of 1968 destroyed the store and his livelihood. While the author describes his father as someone who seemed to get little enjoyment late in life, it was his father who instilled in his son a love of bird watching. As the author and his father achieve toward the end an intimate, fragile truce, Winakur recalls the long medical journey that brought him to devote himself t
| Title | : | Memory Lessons: A Doctor's Story |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.69 (337 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1401303021 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2008-12-30 |
| Genre | : |
"Jerald Winakur poignantly brings together his personal and professional lives in this healing work, a deeply humane and utterly forthright book of memories, lessons, and revelations."--Edward Hirsch, author of Special Orders: Poems"Memory Lessons is a beautifully written and moving book that is both personal and universal."--Christine K. Cassel, M.D., president of the American Board of Internal Medicine "A beautifully written account by a physician son describing his father's decline from Alzheimer's, Memory Lessons is a wise and lasting treatise about sickness and health, life and death, and the redeeming power of love."--Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner"Memory Lessons is a searing, heartbreaking, and beautifully written account of a physician's battle against Alzheimer's -- among aging patients in general, but more personally as the disease slowly steals Dr. Winakur's own father. Like all fine lit
Jerry Winakur, as I know him, and I were high school classmates back in the 1960's. I wish I could've purchased the whole set or at least be able to pick which one I get. A long-term care facility is a possibililty, but neither of his parents wants that. He reminds us that in 1975, when he was completing his residency in internal medicine, the AMA "took the position that the withdrawal of a respirator from a patient who required one was a form of euthanisia, tantamount to murder."
Clearly, there is no easy answer to these and other difficult questions about the elderly. Literally. Only received one on van Gogh. As a geriatric physician who has treated thousands of the "old old"--patients over 85--Winakur might be expected to have a clearer view than most of us on such questions of care. Winakur makes decisions, but can never be certain he is doing the right thing. It is inevitable that anyone reading this wonderful book will have an "ah moment." This is when you say, yes tha
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