As the American Medical Association has long proclaimed, Americans enjoy higher standards of medical care than the rest of mankind. And American medical technology is continually exploring and expanding along the frontiers of science. Yet, as doctors delve deeper into technology, as they apply new techniques, procedures, and ways of administering drugs (as in the case of the morphine given President Reagan during his recent operation), they—and the host of nurses and technicians who assist them— may be in danger of losing the human touch. The patient is treated not as an individual but rather as a case; and the result, Dr. Ian Stevenson contends, is that "while we have been improving the curing side of medicine, we have been neglecting its caring side." Having spent more than 40 years in the medical profession— he received his M.D.degree from McGill University's School of Medicine in Montreal in 1943—Dr. Stevenson is intimately acquainted with the world of men and women in white. His contentions about patient abuse in medical care, therefore, can be neither dismissed nor denied; they are matters of public concern. A native of Montreal who is now a naturalized U.S.citizen, Dr. Stevenson is the Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and a former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine there. He is a graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and a former Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Medicine at Cornell University Medical College in the New York Hospital. He was an associate professor of psychology at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans from 1952 to 1957, when he came to Virginia. For the past 25 years, Dr. Stevenson has conducted research in parapsychology, particularly involving possible cases of reincarnation. He is the author of 10 books, including The Diagnostic Interview, The Psychiatric Examination, and the 4-volume Cases of the Reincarnation Type, involving cases, respectively, in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, Thailand and Burma.

Writing in VQR's Autumn 1984 issue, Jeffrey Meyers analyzed—and found to be often misleading, often mistaken, and sometimes dead wrong—the 17 personal memoirs written by people who allegedly knew Ernest Hemingway. This autumn, in conjunction with the publication of his own account of Hemingway's life and work—Hemingway: A Biography, due out from Harper & Row this month—Mr. Meyers describes how he went about researching and re-creating the turbulent career of a great 20th-century American writer. His dogged pursuit of the evasive Ernest took Mr. Meyers from Key West to Ketchum, Boston to Belgravia and involved dozens of personal interviews, several described in his latest VQR essay. A professor of English at the University of Colorado, Mr. Meyers is the author of 20 books, including biographies of Katherine Mansfield and Wyndham Lewis. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright program, and the Guggenheim Foundation.