One's identity as a physician or as a patient trumps any other identifier, suggests Jody Heymann's odd and troubling narrative. Part ideological cant, part cry of pain, and part steadfast attempt to educate physicians about what patients need from them, Equal Partners shows the immiscibility of the perspectives of patient and physician and then makes the radical proposal that the divide between them need not persist.

One week after graduating from Harvard Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government, the author had a seizure, probably related to a motor-cortex hemangioma. The book's overt plot follows the first-person narrator's neurosurgical evaluations, operations, and slow recovery marked by innumerable setbacks. The subtexts of the narrative are anger and denial, barely controlled by an assortment of professional dictions (public health advocate, caring pediatric intern, victim of discrimination against epileptics, political activist, pop psychologist examining medical training) that, however intrusive, do not fully mask the author's great fear and great rage.

The neurosurgical milieu offers the story a governing image—one side of self is patient, one side of self is physician. There is no mediating current between them; the corpus has been cut. "The words were ... spoken by a new physician ... but they belied the feelings of the patient who was occupying the same body" (50). Heymann's reader realizes, with great and unremitting sadness, that the suffering and the knowing cannot inhabit the same space.

When physicians become sick, they are shocked to discover how badly sick persons are treated and, by extension, how badly they themselves treat sick persons. Joining other authors of narratives of wounded healers, Heymann writes with the hope that others can learn from her epiphanies. Physicians must learn what it is like to be sick, she insists, including such ordinary and overlooked aspects of illness as postoperative recovery or acquiescence to medications' side effects. The patient's experiences must govern care.

Despite its jarring structure and distracting assortment of dictions, this book is a powerful testimony to a brave physician's fierce desire to be of service to sick persons and her equally fierce belief that contemporary medicine prevents physicians from serving their patients well. Her profound and simple recommendations—let students get to know patients' experiences, give doctors and patients time to talk, encourage doctors to talk about their emotions—are absolutely true and incontrovertible. By having been wounded both as a physician and as a patient, Jody Heymann can tell more than most of us about the indignities, the sterilities, and the wrongs of a medicine that ought to know and to care and to heal. If we have something like her courage, and if we can put aside our own defensiveness, we will try to follow her advice.