Stay With Me: Stories of a Black Bag Doctor

This is a powerful and well-written book about medicine at its deepest level of healing. It should be read by not only lay-people but by every medical student and physician, young and old. With insight and humor, Dr. Anderson Spickard, Jr. shares stories from his fifty year career as a teacher and a "black-bag doctor", a physician willing to make house calls. The reader encounters young athletes with heat stroke and a falling tree that creates an epidemic of histoplasmosis. We witness a preventable death in a horsehair chair and a merciful death in an ambulance. In Stay with Me Dr. Spickard takes us with him on a professional and spiritual journey. He finds new ways to stay with his patients as they recover from serious illness or face impending death. Through it all, Dr. Spickard explores the holy ground between patients and doctors, and shares important lessons for the practice of medicine in the 21st century.