Kenneth Weinberg’s memoir, Exquisite Moments of Sorrow and Grace (self-published, 370 pages, 2025) shares scenes from his interesting, passionate, and non-linear career. The son and grandson of physicians, Weinberg graduated with a television and film degree from UW-Madison in the 1960s and then—after several years—inexorably found his way into medical school, first in Mexico and then in the Caribbean. He entered an internal medicine residency at LA County and then a psychoneuroimmunology fellowship at the Manhattan VA. He joined the staff of emergency departments—first in New York City and then in New Jersey—before working in urgent care clinics, doing home and virtual visits and, finally, developing a practice that provides medical cannabis services.
In the opening chapters, Weinberg writes about his upbringing and early journey. A longer middle section shares interlacing vignettes of late night patient encounters in the emergency department and his personal life. The final nine chapters tell of his path heading toward the end of his clinical career. Many chapters are built around specific memorable patient encounters, sharing moments, as the book title suggests, of “sorrow and grace.”
The best stories center on times when he opens himself to his patients or when he recognizes his own fallibility. In one chapter, “Sunday’s Sorrow,” Weinberg sees a patient in the emergency room whose persistent abdominal pain has been dismissed by the man’s family physician. A scan in the ED reveals the array of liver metastases causing the discomfort. Having met the patient only hours before, Weinberg is the person who must share the awful diagnosis; he goes out of his way to help the family connect with a more compassionate physician. In a perfectly natural and impromptu moment, the doctor, patient, and grateful family embrace. “I thought about how being a doctor meant not simply keeping your mind open but your heart as well, and I realized that in that moment of spontaneously sharing the sorrow and tears and hugs, I had found another way of healing, not from a textbook, but from a patient in need.”
Stories from the 1980s and 1990s share glimpses of a time when emergency medicine was still finding its footing. At the time, previously sleepy suburban hospital emergency rooms transitioned into places caring for the sickest patients despite being modestly equipped and having little administrative support, in-house imaging, or ready back-up. He was there in the thick of it.
Running through the narrative is a nod to Weinberg’s Jewish heritage. He respects his father and grandfather’s work as physicians and shares his love for his mother who was an accomplished artist. Although he is, by his own description, a bit of a wise guy and a nonobservant Jew, his stories often touch on theology, mystery, and the transcendental. He notices the synchronicity of life and explores mind-body interactions. He finds centering in the Quaker practice of clearness committees. He revels in connections and finds meaning in his writing and in the narrative medicine community. He notes how literature and writing were transformative, opening him to “the humility and total attention that I think all of us practitioners should acquire and bring to our interactions with our patients.”
Weinberg illustrates what it was like to practice attentive, humanistic medicine, a trait Intima’s editors recognized over the years by publishing four of his essays, “The Little Nowhere of the Mind,” “Wind Tunnel,” “Schmeckle Down,” and “Fucking Headache.”
Throughout the book, Weinberg models what it will take for young physicians to stay engaged as caring, narrative-centered clinicians in the future. — Bruce H. Campbell
Bruce H. Campbell, MD, FACS is a retired head and neck cancer surgeon and Professor Emeritus of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is a nonfiction and book editor for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and author of A Fullness of Uncertain Significance: Stories of Surgery, Clarity, and Grace (Ten16 Press, 2021).