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The Old Doctor
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $23.95
ISBN13: 9781685138196
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: Nov 19 2026
Pages: 414
Weight: 1.21
Height: 0.92 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For nearly seventy years, Dr. Elmer Whatley has been Palo Alto's steadiest psychiatrist. Bow tie, doctor's bag, a root beer on the desk. He can name almost anyone's pain. He has never managed to name his own.
It is 2002, and at ninety-four Elmer still walks to his Waverly Street office every morning. Then a patient he treated for years dies of lithium toxicity, and the man's family sues him for malpractice. As the lawsuit moves toward depositions in a San Francisco tower, Elmer has to ask the question every doctor dreads: did I do this?
The case brings back the losses he has never faced. There is Lillian, the fearless Army nurse he met in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, whose fire and dark spells he lived beside for decades without ever giving them a name. There is Charlie, their only son, a postal supervisor who wasted away in the first terrible years of AIDS while Stanford's doctors raced to save him with an experimental drug. And there is the colleague Elmer trusted with his grieving wife, whose betrayal he cannot forgive.
Moving between 1941 and the turn of the millennium, The Old Doctor follows a family of healers through hospital wards, hearing rooms, therapy couches and Sunday dinners. It is a tender, unflinching novel about medicine and its limits, a marriage tested by mental illness, the faith a man loses and finds again, and whether a long life of service can make peace with its failures. In the end, Elmer may also find out whether a physician can heal himself.
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