Since all of them suffered from dementia, a revealing portrait of this devastating illness emerges. One by one, he interviews the families of the patients Oscar accompanied in their final hours. When a trustworthy nurse at the Steere House tells Dosa about the cat's extraordinary talent, he is at first skeptical and sets about investigating the matter.

These stories form the heart of the book, and Oscar's tale serves as an ideal vehicle for sharing them. It is a fulfillment, he says, that comes from bearing witness to the stories of his patients as they live the last of their days. The fulfillment he derives from his vocation among the elderly does not seem to leave much room for feelings of martyrdom or envy. And while many young people enter medicine hoping to someday be the celebrated bearers of miracle cures, geriatric care focuses on helping individuals adapt to the inevitable frailties and limitations that come with age.īut Dosa does not lament or even mention what he has foregone in money, power, and prestige. Why is this the case at a time when our aging population needs more practitioners equipped to care for its elderly members? In a fee-for-service system that pays physicians for performing procedures and seeing a high volume of patients, the time-intensive nature of geriatric medicine makes it a specialty with some of the lowest reimbursement for the greatest amount of work. Geriatric fellowship training programs at even the most prestigious institutions are sometimes unable to find willing candidates.

I call his career decision unusual because gerontology remains among the least popular fields of practice for medical students to enter. He begins the book by explaining why he made the unusual choice to specialize in care for the elderly. The author, David Dosa, is a geriatrician at the Steere House Nursing Center in Rhode Island where Oscar lives. Now, years later, a book entitled Making Rounds with Oscar chronicles a doctor's discovery of the animal's special gift. The story generated a good deal of interest, earning the feline 15 minutes of fame. The furry creature's presence at a person's bedside invariably signaled that life's end was near. Living as a pet in a nursing home dementia unit, Oscar demonstrated an uncanny ability to predict which of its residents were about to die. In a 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, amid the usual fare of the latest and greatest in biomedical research, there appeared a short piece about a cat named Oscar ( 1).

Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa