A moving memoir and a fantastic love story that shows how an expert physician became a family group caregiver and learned why care is so central to all or any our lives and yet reaches risk in today’s world.

When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and cultural anthropologist, began looking after his wife, Joan, after she was identified as having early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, he found just how considerably the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Spirit of Treatment: The Moral about The Spirit of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a health care provider Education of the Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman provides a deeply humane and motivating story of his existence in medicine and his relationship to Joan, and he identifies the practical, psychological and moral aspects of caretaking. He also writes about the issues our society encounters as medical technology advances and the expense of health care soars but looking after patients no more seems important.

Caregiving is lengthy, hard, unglamorous work–at occasions joyous, more regularly tedious, sometimes agonizing, but it is always abundant with meaning. In the face of our current political indifference and the task to medical care program, he emphasizes how exactly we must question uncomfortable queries of ourselves, and of our doctors. To provide care, to be ‘present’ for someone who requires us, and to feel and display kindness are deep emotional and moral experiences, enactments of our primary beliefs. The practice of caregiving shows us what’s most important in life, and reveals the heart of what it is to be human being.