THE MEMOIRS OF STEVEN BENTLEY, M.D.

A License
to Heal.

Random Memories of an ER Doctor

Life and death. Grief and humor. An emergency physician remembers the people behind the patients.

Step inside the memoir

And the life before medicine: Poor No More

A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor, original green 2014 cover — THE ORIGINAL MEMOIR2014 · iUniverse

Two memoirs. One physician’s life.Meet the man behind the medicine

01 / INSIDE A LICENSE TO HEAL

Training—Internship and Residency · Chapter 3

A PATIENT REMEMBERED

Solomon
Darby.

Some encounters stay with a doctor long after the hospital rounds.

Read the author’s chapter excerpt

The morning rounds
During Bentley’s training, Solomon Darby was one of many patients on a busy ward. Each morning, he said he was doing well.
The question not asked
Darby had lost movement in his legs, but had not mentioned it. Bentley had not specifically asked.
A closer kind of attention
Bentley recounts urgent treatment, the return of movement, and the closer attention he gave Darby afterward.

Elsewhere in the memoir: a young widow’s grief, the realities of emergency care, and moments of unexpected humor.

02 / THE LIFE BEHIND THE PHYSICIAN

A second, independent memoir

BEFORE THE WHITE COAT

Poor No MoreAn American Dream

Before the emergency room, there was a boy looking for a way forward.

Bentley’s second memoir turns to his own life: childhood poverty and family adversity, an early interest in medicine while working in his father’s pharmacy, and the education that led him toward becoming a physician.

Where A License to Heal looks outward to the people he treated, Poor No More looks back at the life he lived.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Bentley, M.D.

A Georgia beginning.
A career in North Carolina.
A life recalled in two memoirs.

Steven Bentley grew up in Georgia and graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta in 1978. He spent the majority of his medical career in the emergency departments of North Carolina hospitals.

His books offer two ways into that life: the experiences of emergency medicine, and the personal history of the man who practiced it.