Steve Balch is the emeritus Director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University. He is also the founding President of the National Association of Scholars.
If you’ve ever wondered what the practice of medicine would look like viewed through a proctoscope, the answers are here and they’re mainly hilarious. With this book, Neil Kurtzman, a distinguished physician and medical scientist, shows himself in the same comic league as Jerry Seinfeld, Woody Allen, and the even greater genius who scripted The Three Stooges. Think misdiagnoses, iatrogenic illnesses, lost biopsies, and rampant malpractice can’t be funny – well think again! The real medical education of Kurtzman’s picaresque hero, Richard Grollman, (actually his youthful late 1950s and early self) is almost nothing about texts and lectures than it is the experience of his own, his peers, and his supposed mentor’s repeated follies and confusions. And it results in his recognition of a deep truth not only about medicine but the whole wide world: given the mediocrity, self-serving, and vainglory of nearly all within it, leaving problems to resolve themselves is most often the best policy. You might not believe this true for our most esteemed profession before reading Doing Nothing, but you will certainly afterward. Indeed, if you ever suspect you’re seriously ill don’t deliver yourself to a hospital, read this book instead. At least you’ll die laughing.
