Medicine Men

Molly Bonner has a problem. Horrible, debilitating headaches have sent her tumbling down a medical rabbit hole into a nightmarish world of hospitals, tests, and-- worst of all--unfeeling male doctors who all suffer in varying degrees from the delusion that they are God. Her specialist, her surgeon, her best friend's lover, and even her own boyfriend are cut from this same arrogant cloth. This raises the question early in Alice Adams's novel Medicine Men, why doesn't Molly just find a woman doctor and a new beau?

In Medicine Men Alice Adams explores many issues surrounding the doctor- patient relationship: the dismissive condescension doctors often display toward patients, the unquestioning acceptance of authority patients often grant their doctors. When the patient is a woman and the doctor a man, there's an added patina of expectation on both sides--that the woman be docile, a "good patient," the man all-knowing, capable of solving all problems. These are fascinating subjects, but in making almost all the doctors male and unbearable and all the women passive and victimized, Adams is skating dangerously close to charicature rather than character.