Mark Vonnegut- The Heart of Caring A Life in Pediatrics

Pediatrician Mark Vonnegut has spent forty years treating children for coughs, fevers, ear infections, and sometimes more serious complaints. In that time, he has seen the American medical system change in ways he couldn’t have imagined as a medical student—some of them good, others not so good. But what hasn’t changed is his commitment to his young patients, whose stories fill the pages of this book.

There’s Anna Maria, a little girl with an incurable case of bone cancer; Adeline, who has a syndrome so rare none of Dr. Vonnegut’s colleagues have seen it before; Marlowe, whose life-threatening anemia is cured by his just-born baby brother; Jamal, who is autistic but has so much empathy that he donates his hair to a company that makes wigs for chemotherapy patients; and Malcolm, who is permanently paralyzed from the waist down and whose regular care includes treatment for bedsores, medication for urinary tract infections, and mountains of paperwork attesting that his wheelchair is still “medically necessary.”

Whether recounting the cases that have stuck with him or detailing the changes in medicine that he has seen over the past four decades—the privatization of healthcare, the barriers to mental health services, the skyrocketing costs of insurance and pharmaceutical drugs, and the decreasing quality of care—Dr. Vonnegut is a personable guide through what is often seen as an impersonal system. He doesn’t pull any punches in his criticisms of the medical-industrial complex, but The Heart of Caring isn’t a diatribe. It’s the story of a life lived in medicine, with all the hope and heartbreak that entails.

After writing The Eden Express, a memoir detailing his struggle with psychosis and manic depression, MARK VONNEGUT gained acceptance to Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1979. The father of two grown sons and the grandfather of five, he lives with his wife and his youngest son in Milton, Massachusetts, where he continues to practice primary care pediatrics. Dr. Vonnegut is also the author of Just Like Someone without Mental Illness Only More So (Delacorte Press, 2010).