Dean-David Schillinger
Telltale Hearts: A Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story
(PublicAffairs, July 2024)
A doctor’s powerful meditation on what his patients taught him and what they can teach us about health, empathy and healing.
For over four decades, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger has been a witness to the evolution of public health in America. From his days as a young, bright eyed resident to the Chief of Internal Medicine at one of the country’s largest public hospitals, Schillinger has seen thousands of patients and observed how our healthcare system can both work for and against them. Yet, it wasn’t insurance or improved medical tests that mattered most; it was simply listening to his patients.
In Telltale Hearts, Schillinger takes readers into the exam rooms of a public hospital as he recounts his various experiences with patients and how listening to their stories, their backgrounds and more, revolutionized his own approach to medicine. In a hospital that serves mostly low income and marginalized populations, it was never just the injury or ailment that was the whole story but rather the social, political and racial circumstances that led patients to the hospital in the first place. A woman who refuses to take her pills actually cannot swallow them to begin with while another who seems to be skipping her insulin injections has a family member who is stealing them. A patient with Type 2 diabetes doesn’t just suffer from high blood sugar but has consistently lived in a food desert where sugary beverages and unhealthy food were the only options. With each story and each patient, Schillinger urges us to look at how listening to patients not only can lead to better care in a hospital, but a more empathetic approach to public health in general.
Written with compassion and introspection, Telltale Hearts is a moving portrait of modern medicine and an urgent call for change in how we, as a society, take care of our own.
Praise for Telltale Hearts:
“With this remarkable work, woven from strands of memoir, reportage, prophecy, and stinging indictment, shot through with bright threads of humor and tenderness and beautifully written, DDS brings clarity, curiosity, patience, understanding, and an undeniable literary gift to bear on the practice of medicine in this inhumane age.”
—Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow
“Telltale Hearts digs deep into the humanity of patients and caregivers alike, revealing the indispensable connection between medicine and storytelling. Timely and telling!”
—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, Bellevue Literary Review and author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.
“Schillinger, a master clinician, uses powerful stories to bring the reader face-to-face with the root causes of the nation’s most pressing health problems. A compelling, beautifully written must-read for all of us who have a personal stake in improving our health and the health of our communities.”
—Ronald Epstein MD, author of Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity
“[Schillinger] reveals an exceptional going out of his way for his patients, of pursuing a cause he believes in, whether preventing diabetes or speaking out against built-in racism. He is also a family man, a tribal man, an observant man. His book could equally well have been entitled, Telltale Heart.”
—Victoria Sweet, MD, author of Slow Medicine
Dean-David Schillinger is a primary care physician, scientist, author, and public health advocate. Dr. Schillinger is an internationally recognized expert in health communication and has been widely recognized for his work related to improving the health of vulnerable populations. He is credited with a number of discoveries in primary care and health communication and is considered one of the founders of the field of health literacy. He is a practicing general internist and Chief of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), where he founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations (CVP) in 2006, a leading research center committed to addressing the social determinants of health through research, education, policy and practice.