The Rhetoric of Medicine

Nathan Selden is Chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery and holds the Mario and Edith Campagna Endowed Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Oregon Health & Science University. He is also Chair-elect of the OHSU Professional Board. He took his B.A. from Stanford, a Ph.D. from Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard. 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 author of over a hundred and twenty papers in peer-reviewed journals. In 2013 he was awarded a Parker Palmer Courage to Teach award by the U.S. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. He is currently Secretary of the Society of Neurological Surgeons and is past-president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. Nigel Nicholson is the Walter Mintz Professor of Classics and Dean of the Faculty at Reed College. He took his BA from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. fromthe University of Pennsylvania, and has been at Reed college since 1995. 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.

If we spend the time to dig deeply into the "rhetoric" of medicine over time, as the authors Nicholson and Selden have done, we find the motivations of early doctors, their foibles and how they perceived themselves. It is an incredibly rich story with lessons around money, competition and autonomy for doctors and for the patients they serve.