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About the Author

David Watts, M.D., is a poet and a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

Praise for Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer…

“David Watts is a gifted storyteller with a sense of the poetic, macabre, ironic, and surreal. He combines eloquence, erudition, and an ear for the gritty vernacular of the examining room and ER—a thoroughly satisfying read.”—Leonard Shlain, author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess and Sex, Time and Power

“Watts can compress humor, pathos, and bewitching ambiguity into a few pages. Acting like a doctor, as he counsels himself, carries the risk of arrogance. Being a doctor demands a profound and grateful openness to the unknown.” —Steven Winn, arts and culture critic, San Francisco Chronicle

“These encounters with his patients by a wise, kind doctor are finely wrought in language that is always clear and compassionate. They are a welcome addition to the growing body of literature from the experience of medicine.” —Richard Selzer, surgeon and author of The Whistler’s Room

“Even the most routine checkup will never be quite the same. Watts’s sympathy for both physicians and their patients subtly changes our understanding of what it means to heal and be healed, and to put our trust in the hands of a practitioner who is just as complex, flawed—and human—as we are.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Always sensitive, sometimes hilarious.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Candid, poetic prose . . . You’ll wish your doctor were half as attentive.” —Newsweek