Rough sleepers : Dr. Jim O'Connell and his quest to create a community of care
(Book)

Rough sleepers : Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people

Includes bibliographic references.

After Jim O'Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the hospital's chief of medicine made a proposal: Would O'Connell defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn't refuse. But that year turned into his life's work. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O'Connell, his colleagues, and their patients. In this illuminating book we travel with O'Connell as he navigates Boston, offering medical care, socks, soup, humor, and friendship to some of the city's most endangered citizens, emphasizing a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls "a system of friends." We get to know his patients not as problems but as human beings in their true complexity--difficult and charming, self-destructive and brave. -- From inside front cover.