Dr. Mayo's Boy

An ophthalmologist recounts the lives and experiences of three generations of doctors in America, revealing changes in health care.

Dr. Mayo’s Boy chronicles the medical experiences of a family of Texas physicians in small town Waxahachie and big city Dallas. Full of stories that are often heartening in their humanity and sometimes disturbing in what they reveal about contemporary health care, this book explores how physicians have viewed their commitment to their patients, how they sacrificed to meet the challenges they face, and how the practice of medicine has changed over almost sixty years. While Dr. Mayo’s Boy is by no means a policy statement, it does offer a nostalgic but clear-eyed look at the past and, through its tales of three doctors’ lives, asks implicit questions about how we “manage” health care today. There must remain one constant—the need for a patient to know that their doctor cares about them as an individual.

Praise for Dr. Mayo’s Boy

“An extraordinary book. Rob Tenery traces the evolution of health care in this country and show how much medicine has gained—and lost—in the past hundred years. In a highly entertaining and eloquent way, Dr. Tenery makes a plea for medicine to return to its roots as a healing profession rather than as a business. Highly recommended!” —Dean Ornish, MD, founder and president of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco