Twelve Patients - by Eric Manheimer (Paperback)

About the Book

A former medical director of Bellevue Hospital in New York offers stories from the case histories of twelve patients, ranging from a homeless man to a prominent Wall Street financier, to humanize current social issues.

Book Synopsis

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks and the inspiration for the NBC drama New Amsterdam, this memoir from a Medical Director of Bellevue Hospital looks poignantly at patients' lives, highlighting the complex mind-body connection.

"As intensely involving as any scripted for a television medical drama." --The New York Daily News

Twelve Patients shows the plights of twelve very different patients--from dignitaries at the nearby UN, to supermax prisoners at Riker's Island, to illegal immigrants, and Wall Street tycoons.

Dr. Eric Manheimer is not only the medical director of the country's oldest public hospital--he is also a patient. As the book unfolds, the narrator is diagnosed with cancer and is forced to wrestle with the end of his own life even as he struggles to save the lives of others.

"This book is not only brilliant, it is deeply moving, and as socially and politically important as anything I have read over the past ten years." --James F. Gilligan, psychiatrist and author

About the Author

Eric Manheimer, M.D. was the Medical Director at Bellevue for over thirteen years and is a Clinical Professor at the New York University School of Medicine. He is an Internist who trained at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York in Internal Medicine. Following his Chief Residency there, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire where he was a member of Dartmouth Medical School and the Hitchcock Clinic for many years.

He has had a long interest in international health working in Haiti and Pakistan and in medical anthropology, history, the social sciences and literature particularly of Latin America. Along with his wife Diana Taylor, who is a University Professor at New York University, Eric travels extensively in Latin America and Mexico. He has two children and one grandchild, who was born at Bellevue.