YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
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Karen Peart - [email protected]
Helaine Patterson - [email protected]
YALE PHYSICIAN PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO THE AIDS EPIDEMIC
Memoir Also Reveals His Own Struggle to Face Issues of Life, Death and Grief
NEW HAVEN, Conn., March 25, 1998---With the advent of new drugs, ongoing research and prevention programs, an AIDS diagnosis is no longer considered to be a swift death sentence. This was not the case 17 years ago, when Peter Selwyn, M.D., M.P.H., fresh out of medical school, found himself in the midst of the burgeoning AIDS epidemic at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. Back then, young adults were just beginning to die, in growing numbers, from a plague that had yet to be named.
In a new book, Surviving The Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor, Dr. Selwyn chronicles 10 years of his encounters with hundreds of AIDS patients on Montefiore's medicine wards and later as director of the hospital's drug abuse treatment program. His book describes how the AIDS epidemic impacted an inner-city community, and illustrates the courage and resilience of many who contracted the disease.
"The experience of working with patients, dying with a disease I could not cure, taught me the true meaning of care giving," says Dr. Selwyn. "I also learned that physicians must come to terms with their own grief and loss if they hope to be effective in this role."
The poignant connections Dr. Selwyn made with his patients, their families, especially their children, led him to finally confront his own father's death 30 years earlier from a probable suicide. Dr. Selwyn began to write this story of tragic death and personal growth in 1995. "I didn't have any notes, nor did I ever keep a journal of those years," says Dr. Selwyn, now associate director of the AIDS program and associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. "But I always felt as if I were carrying a lot of these stories and patients' memories around in my head and I wanted to get them on paper."
Dr. Selwyn continues to work with AIDS patients at Yale and is a recent recipient of a Faculty Scholars Award from the Open Society Institute's Project on Death in America (PDIA). He is using the award to help develop the clinical and research program at Leeway, a 30-bed skilled nursing facility for people with HIV and AIDS in New Haven. Surviving The Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor, is published by Yale University Press.
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