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This book is a must read for informing the dialogue about health care reform and transforming medical education. Its humanistic authors provide support for re-integrating the lost art of humanism with more scientific medicine. The authors’ passion for the individual behind the illness is contagious. They provide examples connecting research evidence and the recipe format of a diagnostic pathway with authentic listening to patients’ narratives.  The authors call for honoring the context for the presenting problem before ordering costly tests and hospitalization. Their argument for bringing back the value of clinical judgment is brilliantly written, and is amply supported with case studies. In many ways this is a book about the humanism of the physician as much as it is about patients as human beings.”

--Afaf I. Meleis, Ph.D., DrPS (hon), FAAN, Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania