title: Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer
author: David Watts M.D.
description: David Watts is a gifted storyteller with a sense of the poetic, macabre, ironic, and surreal. He combines eloquence, erudition, and an ear for the gritty vernacular of the examining room and ERa thoroughly satisfying read.Leonard Shlain, author of <i>The Alphabet Versus the Goddess</i> and <i>Sex, Time and Power</i><br /><br />Watts can compress humor, pathos, and bewitching ambiguity into a few pages. Acting like a doctor, as he counsels himself, carries the risk of arrogance. Being a doctor demands a profound and grateful openness to the unknown. Steven Winn, arts and culture critic, <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i><br /><br />These encounters with his patients by a wise, kind doctor are finely wrought in language that is always clear and compassionate. They are a welcome addition to the growing body of literature from the experience of medicine. Richard Selzer, surgeon and author of <i>The Whistlers Room</i><br /><br />Even the most routine checkup will never be quite the same. Wattss sympathy for both physicians and their patients subtly changes our understanding of what it means to heal and be healed, and to put our trust in the hands of a practitioner who is just as complex, flawedand humanas we are. Francine Prose, <i>O, The Oprah Magazine</i><br /><br />Always sensitive, sometimes hilarious. <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i><br /><br />Candid, poetic prose . . . Youll wish your doctor were half as attentive. <i>Newsweek<br /><br /></i>
zlib_text: The Host
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > The Host
  
  > The Host
  
  > By Meyer, Stephenie
  
  > PROLOGUE
  
  > Inserted
  
  > The Healer’s name was Fords Deep Waters.
  
  > Because he was a soul, by nature he was all things good: compassionate,
  > patient, honest, virtuous, and full of love. Anxiety was an unusual emotion
  > for Fords Deep Waters.
  
  > Irritation was even rarer. However, because Fords Deep Waters lived inside a
  > human body, irritation was sometimes inescapable.
  
  > As the whispers of the Healing students buzzed in the far corner of the
  > operating room, his lips pressed together into a tight line. The expression
  > felt out of place on a mouth more often given to smiling.
  
  > Darren, his regular assistant, saw the grimace and patted his shoulder.
  
  > “They’re just curious, Fords,” he said quietly.
  
  > “An insertion is hardly an interesting or challenging procedure. Any soul on
  > the street could perform it in an emergency. There’s nothing for them to
  > learn by observing today.” Fords was surprised to hear the s