The Uncommon Thread by R. Scott Anderson

There is not a boring, doctor-ly moment among the forty-plus essays here, all written in friendly, jargon-free prose. Essays take the reader to Africa, Italy, and around the United States but Anderson wraps himself in his flag of “Ameriphilia” happy to return home: “I love the USA, I love hamburgers, and I sure do love ice in my Coca-Cola.” “According to Plan” includes excellent parenting and life advice, though almost by accident, and humanizes Anderson in his quest for understanding through counseling.Īnderson is a son of the south but his drawl peeks out only now and again as in “Occupy Bourbon Street,” where we meet his buddy Gordon. In “Envy,” Anderson introduces us to two patients in a VA hospital-both suffering from respiratory illness. The Uncommon Thread is a highly readable and personal collection by a doctor who rolls up his sleeves, bares his soul, and takes the reader along for a raucous, contemporary, and unique ride.

At least some of the mystery is being revealed as we’re afforded a peek behind the stethoscope, with the surge of memoirs, essay collections, and daily newspapers and literary journals printing personal essays by physicians. Scott Anderson’s new collection of essays, compiled from his longtime column in the respected Mississippi State Medical Association Journal, provides bite-size laughs, aha moments, and surprises perfect for consuming in short jags.ĭoctors are strangers to their patients today and it is no wonder, with the average office visit lasting between thirteen and sixteen minutes, during which the doctor barely looks up, dictates a stream of unintelligible medical lingo into his/her computer, consults their smart phone and rushes out the door (a minimum of seventeen patients per day is reportedly needed to make ends meet in 2012). One thing we know for sure is that laughter is the best remedy for small and large-scale blues. I want to show it all, the threads, the fabric, all of it. Medicine we think of as a white coat, but it just looks white because each thread, although it’s a different color, shines with promise and adds to the whole. It is like taking thread to make a cloth, then taking that cloth and making a garment. That fabric of what we are is what allows us to function as the physicians we can become.

We are what we are because of the millions of tiny incidents in our lives that build up like threads woven into a fabric. “What is it about our lives that prepare us to be physicians? Is can’t simply be our education, and it had to be there before medicine was our vocation? It happens all around us every day we practice, and I don’t think it will stop when we retire.

This is a collection of articles from a scientific medical journal that, for the most part, don’t have a thing to do with science or medicine.

The Uncommon Thread by R. Scott Anderson