You are cordially invited to join us for the inaugural AMSA Book Discussion, with physician-writer Samuel Shem, M.D. author of the classic medical novel “The House of God” and a new, acclaimed book “The Spirit of the Place.”

 

This book discussion will take place by Skype webcast (enabling you to listen to Samuel Shem live) on Friday, January 30, 2009, at 7:00PM EST.  To register, send an e-mail directly to [log in to unmask] with your Skype username and the number of participants at your location.   The first 25 registrants will be granted access to the book discussion.  AMSA chapters should consider hosting a group book discussion by watching the webinar together (on campus in a classroom or auditorium, in a hospital conference room, at a host’s home, or anywhere else internet access and screen projection is possible).

 

You can download Skype’s free software at  http://www.skype.com/getconnected/.  You may send questions for the author to [log in to unmask] in advance or during the live book discussion webcast.  See the attached flyer for more details.

 

Samuel Shem, M.D. (pen-name of Stephen Bergman, M.D., Ph.D.) will be a keynote speaker during AMSA’s 59th Annual Convention – Win Back Our Profession to be held March 12-15, 2009 in Arlington, VA / Washington, DC at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City.  For more information and registration go to the website http://amsa.org/conv/

 

About Samuel Shem, M.D.

Samuel Shem's first novel, The House of God, the classic novel of life and death in an American hospital, has sold more than two million copies and is required reading in medical schools throughout the world. Thirty years later Shem returns with The Spirit of the Place, his most ambitious work yet. It goes beyond a focus on young doctors-in-training to that of a world-traveled doctor called home in the early '80s to become the doctor to the small town he ran away from, to face his own history and that of the town itself. A novel of love and death, mothers and sons, ghosts and bullies, doctors and patients, illness and healing, The Spirit of the Place spins a tale of universal human experience and the changing life of a small town with genuine warmth and humor.

 

About “The Spirit of the Place”

After a divorce and a year of wandering the world with "Doctors Without Borders," Orville Rose has settled into a new love with a beautiful Italian spiritual teacher. A telegram informs him that his mother has died. He returns to Columbia, "a Hudson River town plagued by breakage," and the startling terms of his mother's will. She has left him an enormous sum of money and her historic home, but there's a catch: he must live in her house on the Courthouse Square continuously for a year and thirteen days before he can collect. But that's hardly what Orville had in mind. As he struggles with the decision and its aftermath an entire set of unimagined events and personal transformations—both hilarious and poignant—occur.

Spirit shows Shem at his finest—compassionate, capacious, funny, full of big ideas and memorable personalities. It offers an authentic, unvarnished portrait of the medical profession and underscores the crucial link between the health of individuals and the health of communities at a pivotal period of American history. (Literary Ventures Fund)

 

About the Author

Samuel Shem’s classic novel about medical internship, THE HOUSE OF GOD (1978), was recently named by the British medical journal The Lancet as one of the two most important American medical novels of the 20th century, the other being Sinclair Lewis’ ARROWSMITH.  It has sold over two million copies, in thirty languages. John Updike wrote in an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition: “It glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel…A tale of venture into the valley of death and the truth of the flesh…more timely than ever.”  Newsweek listed it in 1999 as “the novel to read about becoming a doctor.”  The sequel, MOUNT MISERY (1996), about psychiatric residency at a mental hospital of that name, has been called “another medical classic,” and, by the Boston Globe, “outrageously funny, a sage and important novel by a healer and a Shakespearean.”  These novels have been bestsellers in America, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Shem is also the author of a FINE (1986), a novel about a psychoanalyst (“Funny…Full of dazzling, zany intelligence…energetic and exuberant”—New York Times”), THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE (to be published in March 2008), and THE MISSING GIRL, a novel set in China (manuscript). As “Dr. Stephen Bergman”, he has given the commencement address at over fifty medical schools, has spoken around the world on “How to Stay Human in Medicine,” and has published a noted essay, “Fiction as Resistance” (Annals of Internal Medicine 2002). Shem, in blurbs for his novels, has been referred to as "the comic genius and the holy terror of medicine," "Rabelaisian," and "the raucous and insightful physician of the soul."

 

For additional information please contact Katherine Ellington at [log in to unmask]

 

 

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