Q&A with Dr. Stephen Bergman
July 7th, 2009 by admin
The Spirit of the Place
By Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Annie Internicola, July 29, 2008
It is with three decades experience as a doctor and a penchant for storytelling that Stephen Bergman, MD, PhD (pen name, Samuel Shem), writes with wit and heart about both sides of the doctor/patient relationship. His highly acclaimed first book, The House of God (1978), continues to sell beyond the two-million mark and is today required reading at many medical schools worldwide because of its authentic depiction of hospital internship, the grueling year medical students must endure as they transition from textbooks to the real world of doctoring. Specializing in psychiatry, Dr. Bergman lectures widely at colleges and medical schools, and has also written the novels Mount Misery (sequel to The House of God) and Fine, the nonfiction book We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men, written with wife Janet Surrey and also penned with Surrey the off-Broadway play “Bill W. and Dr. Bob,” the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (available on DVD).