The Last Physician

“[An] impressive collection. . . . The contributors . . . reveal deeply personal responses to Percy’s work—not just intellectual and aesthetic appreciation but much more profound heartfelt reactions. . . . The Last Physician will certainly engage Percy fans and it should also challenge and inspire others to read his work.” - Carol Donley , Medical Humanities Review

“[T]he collection as a whole helps to explore how medicine influenced Percy’s art and how Percy’s art might yet influence medicine.” - Gary M. Ciuba , Mississippi Quarterly

“[T]hese essays will amply reward readers interested, as the writers are, in relationships between Percy and medicine—or Percy and medical readers. . . . [T]his collection incrementally demonstrates how reading Walker Percy can help those humane, uneasy souls who gaze upon medicine and its morals and find, as he did, that practice is not perfect.” - Peter W. Graham , JAMA

“Elliott and Lantos bring together the refreshingly candid examinations of medical professionals who are sensitive to Walker Percy’s penchant for blending the psychological and spiritual dimensions of health. . . . These writers have closed the gap between the hard sciences and the soft humanities in an instructive and readable fashion.” - S. R. Whited , Choice

“There is much in The Last Physician that will be familiar to readers of Percy—the diagnostic stance that he adopted in writing, his wariness that experts were usurping personal sovereignty, and the trouble that his alienated characters come through. There is also much new insight that will open Percy’s work in fresh ways to readers of Christianity and Literature, who like Percy are concerned with the meaning of life even as it is lived out on an ordinary, and so terrible, Wednesday afternoon.” - J. Robert Baker , Christianity and Literature

"[A] collection of essays most interesting for its insights into the personal connections between Percy and medicine."

- John D. Sykes Jr. , Journal of the NABPR

"[A] sophisticated and engaging discussion of a practice and discourse that has more intricacies than first meet the eye." - Yumna Siddiqi, symploke

“The Last Physician offers the pleasure of Walker Percy’s companionship in leading an examined life. The authors talk with and through Percy’s characters about medicine, about art and suffering, and about how their lives became richer as they acknowledge their share of the world’s troubles.” - Arthur W. Frank, author of At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness and the Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethi

“For Walker Percy’s fans and for readers who are just discovering his work, The Last Physician provides an explanation for why his stories were so seminal in the maturation of many an adult and many an aspiring physician. The issues he wrestled with in his fiction—isolation, ambivalence, alienation—are just as important in today’s society. The Last Physician is proof that Walker Percy’s work will endure, will continue to stimulate discussion, and will continue to inspire generations to come.” - Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner: A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss