Based on journals written during her five years as the clinical director of AIDS programs in Oakland, CA, Death of the Good Doctor is a richly detailed chronicle of the author's compassionate relationships with individual patients through whom she filters the vast complexities of the epidemic. These beautiful, often difficult, and sometimes humorous engagements with her patients were the substance of Kate Scannell's life during her years on the AIDS ward. This is not the standard narrative of a physician acting upon or commenting about her patients from an observer's or authority figure's viewpoint. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer several years after leaving the AIDS ward, Scannell writes from the point of view of both a physician and a woman facing the prospects of her own mortality.