Barry Silverman and Saul Adler’s new book, Manners, Morals, and Medical Care is a reference for medical students, residents, and allied healthcare workers who are just entering the medical field. It outlines what one should expect and what is expected of an individual when embarking on a career at a clinic or hospital. Organized into two sections, the book defines student responsibilities, expectations, and appropriate collegial interactions through the implementation of historical, moral, and ethical narrative techniques.
Chapters discuss the justification of “medical professionalism†as defined in medical school core curriculum, and how and why such ideological norms exist. The book employs clinical scenarios based on incidents chosen to illustrate appropriate behavioral guidelines.
The book also addresses common but difficult interpersonal problems all practitioners deal with that require empathy including delivering bad news, working with families, sexual harassment, the importance of diversity, and burnout in the work place. Each chapter includes short biographies meant to give context of the medicine’s integral role in the development of our modern complex diverse society.
Author Barry Silverman attended Ohio State University where he received his BA and MD degrees in 1967. He completed his medical residency at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, TN, and his cardiology fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Silverman served two years in the heart disease and stroke control program of the USPHS. Emory recruited him to start a cardiology teaching program at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Silverman served full time in the Emory faculty until 1979 and continued as the director of the Northside Hospital’s cardiology department and internal medicine education until 1999. He served as director of cardiology for the Kaiser Health Plan of Georgia for 15 years.
Dr. Silverman is currently on the volunteer Emory teaching faculty at Grady Memorial Hospital. He was the editor of Atlanta Medicine, the journal of the Medical Association of Atlanta, for 25 years. He has written numerous scientific articles and book chapters and served in leadership roles with the Medical Association of Atlanta, American College of Physicians, American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, and American Osler Society. Dr. Silverman has received awards from Northside Hospital, American College of Physicians, Medical Association of Georgia, and the American Heart Association.
Author Saul Adler, MD, MAP W, worked in a pediatric clinic during his military service and then receives his neonatology fellowship training at Boston Lying-in Hospital, now the Birmingham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. While in the faculty at the University of South Florida Medical School, he established the first community-based, specialty-trained, nursing-staffed neonatology unit.
Following that experience, a community hospital in Atlanta recruited him. There, he founded and served as the long-time director of a special-care nursery service that eventually grew to provide services for over 14,000 deliveries each year. He also served as the founding director of the pediatric intensive care unit at the Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital.
