Michael A. LaCombe
Michael LaCombe has developed a career that blends writing with practicing medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and has practiced medicine for over twenty years in rural Maine. He has published one full-length book of medical advice for a general audience, Medicine Made Clear: House Calls From a Maine Country Doctor (Dirigo Press, 1989), contributed to a second book (Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel, Yale University Press, 1993) and edited and contributed to a third book, On Being A Doctor, (American College of Physicians, 1994). His The Pocket Doctor, was published by Andrews & McMeel in September, 1996 and The Pocket Pediatrician, was released in May, 1997. Doctors Afield, also published by Yale University Press and to which he has contributed, has just been released last fall. On Being A Doctor 2, which he edited and to which he contributed, was published in 2001.
Dr. LaCombe is editor of the "On Being A Doctor" and "Ad Libitum" sections of the Annals of Internal Medicine and edited the "Medicine, Science, and Society" and "Reading For Survival" sections of the American Journal of Medicine. More than eighty of his stories and essays have been printed in publications including the Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Medicine, and Hospital Practice, among others.
He has given public readings of his short stories across the country and internationally, and together with Broadway performers Barbara Barry and Paul Hecht, he performed five of his stories at the Mayo Clinic, which performance has been taped and used for the teaching of ethics and humanism in various medical schools and residency programs.
Dr. LaCombe has been featured on "60 Minutes" and "Firing Line" as well as on regional television programs. He has served as a visiting professor of medicine at over forty medical schools and university hospitals, including Yale, Harvard, and UCLA. He appeared with Ann Landers at Harvard Medical School Class Day/Alumni Day in 1993. His readings have been recorded on four audio tapes in addition to two video tapes, and in May, 1997, he read his stories in Auckland, New Zealand while serving as a visiting professor and keynote speaker there.
Articles by Michael LaCombe in Cell 2 Soul.