"Heirs of General Practice" is one of my favorite books by John McPhee. Admittedly, being a physician, I have a bias but McPhee humanizes the subject so well, and with such good humor, it brings the stories alive. I wish it were required reading on medical school curricula for pre-clinical students before they have a chance to be lured away by all the bling of subspecialty tertiary care.

John McPhee has been my favorite non-fiction writer since I first discovered him in the pages of the New Yorker back in college.  This book, although dated, does not disappoint. Set in rural Maine, it follows the careers of doctors who choose family practice over specialization (incomprehensible to my own oncologist, by the way!) I wish my father-in-law, a lifelong, old-school  general/family practitioner, were still alive to lend this to. You cannot help but be captivated by the stories and by the magnificent writing!

I come from a family of general practitioners - my mother was a G.P. and my sister followed in her footsteps - and I am a fan of John McPhee's writing, in general. So I expected to like this book more than I actually did. The book follows the standard McPhee schema - in-depth reporting on a very specific topic, in this case doctors who choose to work as general practitioners. McPhee provides vignettes of a dozen or so such doctors, almost all of them working in Maine.

McPhee is usually very effective in working from the specific to reach more general insights, and it is clear that he would like to do the same here. That is, by focusing on doctors who have opted out of the mainstream, he would like to illuminate some general truths about the practice of mainstream medicine. However, I think his success in doing so is limited, rarely rising above statement of the obvious. By focusing his microscope only on family practitioners working in Maine, the generalizability of any lessons they might offer is questionable. The needs of communities in Maine cannot be considered particularly representative of the U.S. in general.

So the book never really becomes anything more than a series of isolated vignettes of some individual 'maverick' doctors. Which is interesting as far as it goes, but I wish McPhee had been able to do more with the material. By the end I felt that an opportunity had been missed to write a book that would have been of greater general interest.

John McPhee is one of the best non-fiction writers active today. In "Heirs of General Practice" he delves deeply into the General Practice movement in American medicine. In his deft, insightful way he gives us a clear view of what it means to be a general practitioner in a country that rewards specialists more highly, even though what U.S. medicine desperately needs are more doctors in General Practice.

It’s an excellent discussion about a different way to practice medicine. As an equine practitioner in a semi rural area I find that the same issues and solutions and human medicine were equally as important in my practice. I appreciate the doctors who take on they almost full time task of caring for people without the benefit of corporations that are predominant today. The Doctor Who suggested they spoke to me is one of those people and it gives me new appreciation for what he went through early in his career. Excellent description of life for those positions

McPhee never disappoints.  Clearly written in the early '80s but the themes are still relevant.  Read it myself and gave it to a doctor friend, as well.

This book is an excellent brief read regarding the background of family practice doctors.