Official Website of Author
The SOUL of MEDICINE
A Physician's Exploration of Death
and the Question of Being Human
My Story
James I. Raymond, MD, served as Chief Medical and Academic Officer of Palmetto Health, the largest integrated healthcare system in South Carolina. He was appointed Chief Medical and Academic Officer in 2012 and remained in this position until his retirement in 2017. From 1980-1993 he served as Director of Education and Professional Services of Emergency Medicine at Richland Memorial Hospital in Columbia, S.C. During this same period, he also served as the Program Director for the Emergency Medicine Residency Training Program and as the S.C. State EMS Medical Director. Dr. Raymond was Associate Dean and Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. He was responsible for the oversight of Palmetto Health’s graduate medical education programs consisting of over 230 residents and 150 faculty. His duties also included coordination of clinical quality initiatives across the system and supervision of the system’s research programs.
In his role as a regional and statewide medical leader, Dr. Raymond served as Chairman of the Graduate Medical Education Committee for Palmetto Health. He served as President of the Board of Directors of the Richland Memorial Hospital Education and Research Foundation from 1987 to 2017. He was also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of Health Sciences South Carolina. He is a fellow in the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Dr. Raymond is a native of Pennsylvania. He earned his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College and a M.Sc. degree in physical chemistry from the University of Virginia. He received his medical education at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is trained and board-certified in both Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I, TOO, SEEK an unreadable book.” So opens the late Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations. It’s unreadable, not because it’s poorly written or excessively technical, but because it contains “urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.
I mused about the “unreadable” book before I came across Nozick. In fact, one of my personal goals in life has been (and still is) to identify one. I’ve come very close but have never quite gotten there. That said, I hope I’ve made this work as “unreadable” as possible.
From chapter Five – The Sickness
Back in my locked room that night, the same nightmarish vision which had been haunting me for the past few months returned. Its Kafkaesque atmosphere was vivid enough for me to remember it in detail afterward:
As usual, I was standing at the foot of a deserted city street around dusk. The only illumination was from a series of flickering lampposts that receded into a faint blur down its long corridor. On each side were narrow row homes, all built from porous stone material and perfectly identical except for their colors. Like a kaleidoscope, these were constantly changing as a thick, multicolored liquid oozed from the pores, then flowed down the walls in coalescing ribbons. Each house was windowless; its only communication with the street being a single door around whose
lower edge a razor-thin beam of light fanned out upon the sidewalk.
ENDORSEMENTS
Jim Raymond has written a work that beautifully demonstrates how he utilized both his heart and mind in order to experience the full gamut of emotions and knowledge that medicine can bring to its best practitioners. Both healthcare professionals and laypersons alike will glean much from this excellent work.
—Ellis "Mac" Knight, MD, MBA, SVP | CMO, Coker Group
“In the broad category of literature that might be titled ‘Medicine and the Humanities,’ The Soul of Medicine is destined to become a classic. In an era when doctors seem to be focused solely on the science and the business of healthcare, Jim Raymond reminds us that, at its core, the practice of medicine still requires us to wrestle with profound questions about living and dying.”
— James L. Reinertsen, MD
The Soul of Medicine is a deeply personal exploration of a physician’s journey to discover what it means to be human in the context of fulfilling one’s individual potential and role in the larger world. This is a must-read for all healthcare professionals who are struggling with the simplification of medicine to the application of science and, more importantly, for anyone facing the issues of dehumanization in today’s post-modern world.
––Shawn Stinson, MD FACP
SVP Healthcare Innovation and Improvement
BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina
A curiously imaginative, brutally honest exploration by a physician into the many ways human limits, failures, and mortality infect medicine to the core. This a profoundly ethical work, not for the answers it provides but rather for the way it brings us to discern the questions we should be asking.
––George Khushf, PhD, Professor and Director
Center for Bioethics, University of South Carolina