The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor Audiobook (Free)

A moving memoir and a fantastic love story that shows how a specialist physician became a family caregiver and learned why treatment is indeed central to all our lives and yet reaches risk nowadays.

When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and interpersonal anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was identified as having early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, he discovered just how far the work of caregiving expanded beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care: The Moral about The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman provides a deeply humane and motivating tale of his life in medicine and his relationship to Joan, and he describes the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caretaking. He also writes about the issues our society faces as medical technology developments and the expense of healthcare soars but caring for patients no more seems important.

Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work–at occasions joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonizing, nonetheless it is always rich in meaning. When confronted with our current politics indifference and the challenge to the health care system, he emphasizes how exactly we must request uncomfortable questions of ourselves, and of our doctors. To give care, to become ‘present’ for a person who desires us, also to experience and display kindness are deep emotional and moral experiences, enactments of our primary beliefs. The practice of caregiving shows us what’s most significant in life, and reveals the very center of what it really is to be individual.