Medicine Men

Read Medicine Men Storyline:

“A painful and hilarious send-up of grandiose doctors and their barbaric medical miracles. . . . A postmodern Jane Austen romp.” – The Boston GlobeIn a novel that brilliantly conjures up the resilience of the human spirit, Alice Adams draws a clear-eyed portrait of a woman who must overcome her resistance to the help offered by others.Molly Brenner suffers from guilt and headaches. The guilt arrives with the insurance money she receives after the accidental death of her second husband (she was on the verge of separating). And the headaches she at first thinks are just a neurotic manifestation, but when she is diagnosed with a malignancy, she finds herself  once again depending on a man, this time from a profession she loathes, the medical profession.  Amazon.com ReviewMolly Bonner has a problem. Horrible, debilitating headaches have sent her tumbling down a medical rabbit hole into a nightmarish world of hospitals, tests, and-- worst of all--unfeeling male doctors who all suffer in varying degrees from the delusion that they are God. Her specialist, her surgeon, her best friend's lover, and even her own boyfriend are cut from this same arrogant cloth. This raises the question early in Alice Adams's novel Medicine Men, why doesn't Molly just find a woman doctor and a new beau? In Medicine Men Alice Adams explores many issues surrounding the doctor- patient relationship: the dismissive condescension doctors often display toward patients, the unquestioning acceptance of authority patients often grant their doctors. When the patient is a woman and the doctor a man, there's an added patina of expectation on both sides--that the woman be docile, a "good patient," the man all-knowing, capable of solving all problems. These are fascinating subjects, but in making almost all the doctors male and unbearable and all the women passive and victimized, Adams is skating dangerously close to charicature rather than character. From Library JournalIn Adams's breezily written tenth novel, Molly Bonner is having some trouble: her marriage to a stiff, alcoholic New England lawyer has failed; her second husband has just died, leaving her filthy rich with insurance money but terribly guilty because they were about to separate anyway; and the nose bleeds she's been having turn out to result from a golf ball-sized tumor demanding immediate surgery. What's worse, Molly has too many rapacious, self-absorbed "medicine men" in her life, from Dave Jacobs, the domineering creep with whom her friend Felicia has set her up, to Felicia's own married paramour, the oh-so-smug Dr. Raleigh Sanderson. What could have been a nice comedy of manners fall terribly, terribly flat. Even those with grave doubts about doctors will be offended by their depiction here as hopelessly shallow and sleazy, and some readers may find Molly a little shallow herself. With all the slick mating and remating going on, very little time is spent on the consequences for Molly of a possibly fatal disease. Buy where Adams is popular.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.