An award-winning collection of eight moving portraits of people suffering from deadly illnesses explores the spiritual awakenings that people in such situations undergo, as they endure painful and ultimately spiritually triumphant transformations. Reprint. Tour. Diagnosis and treatment have always been two of the major elements of medical practice, but with the introduction of the CAT scan and other sophisticated imaging techniques, diagnosis by the laying on of hands began to lose its position as the leading challenge to clinicians. Moreover, treatment has also become much less demanding. Without denying the primacy of judgment and skill in choosing the right therapeutic option or performing a complex surgical maneuver, I believe that the most challenging aspect of medical care now lies in the obligation of physicians to form sympathetic bonds with their patients. By improving diagnosis and therapy, science and technology have facilitated good doctor-patient relationships in certain ways -- it is far easier for a physician to prescribe a cure than to deliver news of an incurable disease. But science is only of limited help to physicians in forming humane attachments with their patients. Trust, empathy, and benevolence are far too complex for scientific analysis. If kindness and altruism mystify poets, how can we hope that molecular biologists will ever clone love and friendship genes? The Measure of Our Days tells us about Jerome Groopman's way with patients, not directly, but through stories -- the way the Bible, with its stories, grapples with the ineluctable dilemmas of living and dying. Indeed, Groopman takes his title from a Psalm of David, Psalm 39, "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am." Perhaps coincidentally, the preceding Psalm, in which David petitions God for compassion, underscores Groopman's thesis. Groopman's stories recount how he follows the injunction to have regard for those without hope. He hugs them, holds their hands, meditates with them, and shares their tears. Groopman, a hematologist and oncologist with a special interest in AIDS, chronicles the lives and deaths of four patients with AIDS, a man with renal-cell carcinoma, a woman with breast cancer, another with myelofibrosis, and a man who was successfully treated for a lymphoma, only to have acute leukemia develop. There is the boy who underwent successful therapy for acute myeloblastic leukemia, but died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion; the physician with hemophilia, a research fellow in Groopman's own laboratory, who had been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) by contaminated factor VIII concentrates; the Yankee matriarch with myelofibrosis who on her first visit tells Groopman, "Well, we say in Boston that the mayor should be Irish, the barber Italian, and the doctor a Jew"; and the young woman with metastatic breast cancer who refuses medical treatment in favor of Tao healing. All she would accept from Groopman was morphine. These are not everyday cases. Some might say they are too esoteric, too specialized for general readers. On the contrary, their appeal is wide, because each tragic account illuminates the regard of patients and physicians for each other and how they conduct themselves under terrifying circumstances. They are contemporary medical metaphors of Job, who asked, "What is my strength, that I should hope? And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?" I don't know whether these stories happened exactly as told -- a proposition that would require Groopman to remember, word for word, numerous conversations he had with his patients. There are very many dialogues surrounded by quotation marks, but the book does not discuss their authenticity. My impression is that The Measure of Our Days, like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, is a reconstruction of actual events. But this point is of no grave moment, because Groopman's book is more than a collection of moving stories about sick people. Perhaps without intending it, The Measure of Our Days raises important questions about the future of medicine. One problem it presents is where future Groopmans will come from. Surely we will not run out of compassionate physicians, but I worry about a very particular kind of physician who is not only an excellent clinician and wonderful teacher, but also a gifted research scientist. Physicians with this triple combination of talents have always been in short supply, but now, sadly, they are very scarce. This state of affairs is due only in part to tightened financial circumstances. Its causes also include the ever-longer training of physicians who want to learn both a medical specialty and the latest molecular-research techniques; close-minded attitudes about the value of curiosity and scholarship to medicine; and the displacement of professionalism by craft and deal-making. In some academic medical centers, research is not jus