The Rhetoric of Medicine Lessons on Professionalism from Ancient Greece

The Rhetoric of Medicine explores problems that confront medical professionals today by first examining similar problems that confronted physicians in ancient Greece. This framework provides illuminating entry points into challenges faced by the practice of medicine, enabling readers to understand more clearly their shape and operation in the modern context-as well as their possible solutions. Topics covered include: larger cultural ideas about the body; tension between professional values and working for money; effective collaboration and competition with alternative healthcare providers; restrictions on political involvement that are part of a physician's identity; maintaining a space for professional autonomy and judgment; mentoring that is effective but not exclusive; and physicians' recognition of themselves as patients as well as professionals. A unique collaboration between a classicist and a neurosurgeon, The Rhetoric of Medicine is a call to interrogate the narratives and ideas that shape medical care and to revise and replace those that do not serve patient health.

Nigel Nicholson, PhD is the Walter Mintz Professor of Classics and Dean of the Faculty at Reed College in Portland, OR. His research focuses on ancient Greece, specifically Greek athletics, Greek Sicily and Italy, and Greek medicine. He is the author of Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West (Oxford University Press, 2016), and also edited a special Paedagogus Section for Classical World in 2015 on Literary Theory in Graduate and Undergraduate Classics Curricula. He served as President of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest in 2006 and was named Oregon's Professor of the Year for 2005 by the Carnegie Foundation.

Nathan R. Selden, MD, PhD is Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery and holds the Mario and Edith Campagna Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. He is also Chair-elect of the OHSU Professional Board. In his clinical practice, he cares for children with complex brain and spinal disorders and performed the first surgical transplantation of neuronal stem cells in the world. He is currently Secretary of the Society of Neurological Surgeons and is past-President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. In 2013, he received the Parker-Palmer Courage to Teach Award from the U.S. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.