Lee Edits Special Issue Of Annals Of Internal Medicine Devoted To Link Between Time And Medicine

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Richard V. Lee, M.D., University at Buffalo professor of medicine, is editor of a special millennium issue of Annals of Internal Medicine devoted to various interrelationships between time and medicine. The issue was published Jan. 4, 2000.

The confluence of these two forces is not a frequent subject of discussion unless it is to question why one must book an appointment with a physician months in advance or spend hours half-dressed in an exam room waiting for a 15-minute visit.

The 12 essays in this special edition, however, all written by physicians, reflect in philosophical, historical, cultural and sometimes personal terms on the ways time shapes the theory and practice of medicine.

The idea for the issue arose out of lectures Lee presented in a course on world culture taught by Henry Sussman, Ph.D., UB professor of comparative literature. Lee turned one of the lectures into an essay titled "Doctoring to the Music of Time."

The essay centers on two different ways of marking time: circular as experienced in traditional societies, where time's passage is measured by the cycles of the seasons and celestial movements, and linear, based on the concept of progress and characterized by marching ever onward, perhaps toward the "end" of time.

Lee discusses how patients' beliefs about the nature of time influences their notions of health and medicine, and notes the importance of the patient's and healer's notions of time being in synchrony.

The editor of Annals of Internal Medicine decided to make the piece the lead essay in a full issue devoted to time that would be published at the turn of the millennium.

The essays touch on the social meaning of time, technologies of time, personal time from the perspective of physician and patient, and medicine in past, present and future time. They examine such issues as a patient's experience of time during illness, differing interpretations of the relationships between age and time, the disappearance of time in the teaching of medicine and how a diagnosis of serious illness seems to bring time to a standstill.

'I think the issue is a good one, particularly for general readers who are interested in medicine," Lee said. "It presents new and special ways of thinking about medicine and how medicine is taught."

In addition to the lead essay, Lee contributed an interview with 91-year-old Paul Bruce Beeson, M.D., one of Lee's former teachers, who recounts a physician's experiences from early in the 20th century until the present. Beeson is retired professor and chair of the departments of Medicine at Emory and Yale universities, and retired Nuffield Professor Medicine at Oxford University.