Doctor, Patient, Object, Thing

Book excerpt: The surgeon bounded into my life uninvited. He was thirty-nine, talented, charming, and a self-proclaimed yuppie. I was sixty-two, a successful academic, popular with my students, and a self-proclaimed teacher. We had little in common, my surgeon and I, except a vulvectomy: a surgery that he would perform and that I would undergo. The vulvectomy was well done, the relationship was not. This is the story of that relationship. Professor Diane Harvey weaves an engaging story about the relationship between a charismatic, confident, competent youngsurgeon in his late thirties and a popular, award-winning senior professor of philosophy. At first, the young man is her surgeon. As the story enfolds, she becomes his teacher. The purpose of the story is to share thesensitive surgical journey of a patientwith others, especially those who are undergoing or have undergone personal female surgeries such as hysterectomies, mastectomies, and vulvectomies, and to engage the reader in a discussion about the effect on the patient of assembly-line surgery in which the patient is treated by the surgeon as an object. While the emphasis is on personal female surgeries, any reader, male or female, who has undergone or is facing a surgery for life-threatening conditions, will be interested in the relationship between the surgeon and the patient. Certainly, however, this book is a must-give to your mother, sister, adult daughter, wife, lover, or partner and to any friend traveling the surgical journey.