“Szczeklik does a convincing job of showing us how, despite modern technology, medicine is still as much an art as it is a science. The general public will enjoy the journey through the mind of this renaissance thinker, and instructors will find plenty of topics for class discussions. A real gem, this book is highly recommended.”
— Library Journal, starred review
“Drawing on mathematical ideas, physics, music, mythology, clinical science and clinical practice, Szczeklik never forces the issues or compels. He treads lightly. He reminds and explains. He draws attention to details of physiology that can be explained and those that remain mysterious. He shifts gears effortlessly between the known and the mysterious. . . . He approaches the questions of pain, suffering and death that confront the doctor daily and that the world regards as "terrible, futile and destructive". Here he stresses the immense value of the experienced doctor in helping patients in the loneliness of pain. . . . The kathartai, forerunners of doctors in pre-Hippocratic Greece, were said to purify the soul by the soothing and calming combination of music, dance, poetry and song. Szczeklik is in tune with them.”
— Niall O'Higgins, Times Higher Education Supplement
"This is a book about the soul of medicine--and about the relationship of medicine to science. . . . It is medicine not as audited technical expertise but as an art as old as human suffering--and therefore as old as humanity itself. I know nothing about the author . . . but I suspect he was a Renaissance polymath in another life. And whoever translated him into English is clearly the Seamus Heaney of Eastern Europe, because every sentence resonates."
— Kevin Barraclough, British Medical Journal
"Szczeklik foregrounds medicine as a skill derived from magic in which art and science are inseparably woven into a seamless fabric that dissolves traditional boundaries. The book provides contemporary physicians with access to humanistic sources that are the wellspring of their profession and provides humanists with biomedical sources to which they have unwittingly but materially contributed."
— Joseph Perloff, American Journal of Cardiology
"Balancing titans, heroes, medical history and individual accounts is tough to pull off, but the author manages a unique, even poetic synthesis. . . . A thoughtful expression of a life dedicated to medicine."
— Dorian Deshauer, Canadian Medical Association Journal