Medical Doctors Course
Now that Covid has perhaps subsided, I think we all owe a particular debt to doctors. There is an old
Irish saying, “You take, you owe”. Ordinary nonmedical people like me have taken a lot from the medical
profession, so I am offering a yearlong course of a dozen interesting books that I think doctors would
like. It is my way of saying thank you. We would meet for a Zoom lecture and a Zoom discussion on the
first Sunday of each month, starting September, 2023. I appreciate that you are all very busy, so I hope
that roughly a book per month is a reasonable choice (spaced out over a year). This may provide you
with some well earned downtime so the reading and discussion hopefully will be more stimulating than
strenuous. Here's the catch: everybody must pay tuition, but not to me. Like Old Mayor Daley, I work for
favors, not cash. I try to pay off my debts to Asclepius using the coin of my realm: reading books and
messing with people’s minds. You are to pay in the coin of your realm. Here is the physician’s price of
admission to first class: you are to rectify some injustice being done to some sick person and family. I
have had cancer for the past twelve years and I have seen a fair amount of the health care system, not
just people who are sick but families driven to desperation by thievish insurance companies and
mindless bureaucracies. It does not matter where you come from or where you work or what your
medical specialty is or what political regime you live under, problems exist everywhere, taking different
forms under different circumstances. Fix something. Your task is to step up, kick your ass into gear and
fix something that you know should have been fixed long ago. Throw away some bill that an indigent
family cannot pay anyway. Intervene on behalf of some veteran or child or overstressed single parent or
someone on the brink of dementia. Vulnerable people sometimes get hurt in their search for health and
doctors are quite justifiably taken seriously in medical matters, so pick your shots.
Medical Doctor’s Course (see previous post)
September Nature 1.0 to Nature 2.0. From Who? to What? I will send you the short readings not in the
Presocratics Theages killed by statue Exodus 28:28-9 Iliad Book 1, Herodotus Xerxes beating Hellespont
The Presocratics (selections)
October Vendetta and the Law, imposing order on the chaos Aeschylus, Orestia
https://amzn.to/3OPe4My
November Rational Animals. Potentially, intermittently, selectively, tentatively, uncertainly, possibly so.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War (Intro, Corcyra, Plague, Melians) https://amzn.to/3s61qje Euripides,
Bacchae https://amzn.to/3OPTiMB
December Art is Long, Life is Short. A Sirius problem Hippocratic Writings, Section One, “Medicine”
https://amzn.to/47oAiMD
January Psychology and Ethics, Organized Life and Organized Psyche Galen, Avoiding Distress
https://amzn.to/3DSIt6a
February Soul Journey, A Template for the psyche Dante, Divine Comedy (selections)
https://amzn.to/4514HyN
March The Turn Inward Montaigne, selected Essays https://amzn.to/3DOXOEK
