ABOUT PETER
Writer, physician, adventurer.
An award-winning Canadian writer and physician, well known for his humanitarian work — and for treating the whole person in an era when technology crowds out the human side of medicine.
ABOUT PETER
Treating the whole person
Peter Newman is an award-winning Canadian writer and physician, well known for his humanitarian work. His compassionate stories from around the globe give us a window into the privileged, and intimate, world of the doctor–patient relationship. He has practiced comprehensive, cradle-to-the-grave medicine in Canada for many decades. He has also worked from Dominica to the Middle East, and from the Arctic to Africa, in peacetime and war. He shows us a doctor who treats the whole person and truly listens, in an era where technology is crowding out the human side of medicine.
Peter has been sought after as an expert to assess and improve other doctors' standards of care, and has brought continuing medical education to doctors in ten countries.
RECOGNITION
Honoured for service & for stories
Peter received the Presidential Award of the Ontario Medical Association for “exceptional and long-standing humanitarian service that expresses the highest qualities of service by a physician”.
His stories have received the Mimi Divinsky Award for Narrative in Family Medicine and have been short-listed for the International Amy Award for Memoir. They have appeared in the Amy Award Anthology, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Canadian Family Physician, the literary journal La Presa, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal–Humanities. An annual Humanitarian Award has been named in his honour.
MORE, PERSONALLY
"I can't remember when I didn't write."
As a child, I kept diaries, wrote about adventures during family trips, proudly produced the school newspaper in the seventh grade, and was editor of the high school yearbook. Naturally, I wrote poems when falling in love, and later stories when encountering dramas during medical training. Still later, some of my stories appeared in newspapers and medical and literary journals. I worked with fine editors and mentors who helped me hone my writing craft, and encouraged me to open myself more fully on the page.
I have a thing about language. It fascinates me. And languages - I speak four and they open worlds. Sometimes I write about medical disinformation and the effects of fake news, or of the endless flip-flops in medicine: not only our brilliant advances, but also our flip-flops that flop. When feeling frisky, I write about wildlife and the natural world; or how music, light and colour affect our mood. My medical stories from around the world show attempts to connect across cultures. Some of them fail, and distance us, but most of them bind us, and touch our hearts.
GET IN TOUCH
Get in touch with Peter
For speaking invitations, questions about the book, or a note about a story that stayed with you.