Becoming a Doctor

From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share Their Experiences

These original stories reveal the inner lives of the men and women who are often rendered invisible by their white coats. Unfailingly honest, they bring to life doctors’ daily attempts to bring healing to their patients.

In this poignant and fascinating collection, doctors who are writers (and vice versa) relate their real-life journeys from intern to specialist and from student to teacher, reflecting on the rewards, disillusionments, and triumphs experienced along the way. They portray the broad arc of a doctor’s professional lifefrom a medical student’s uneasy first encounter with a cadaver, through the long days and nights of residency, to the later years of practice and teaching informed by hard-won wisdom.

Abigail Zuger remembers the emotional yet rewarding work of caring for an ill woman in the early days of the AIDS crisis. Danielle Ofri takes up dance and finds it brings her to understand the medical pas de deux with a patient. Sandeep Jauhar reflects on the power that a doctor’s words can wield over a patient. And Robert Coles remembers his time as a protégé to the still home-visiting doctor-poet William Carlos Williams. Perri Klass, Peter D. Kramer, Kay Redfield Jamison, Lauren Slater, and othersall add tales of pivotal moments in their lives in the profession.

Reviews

Becoming a Doctor offers a sampling of the countless ways that physicians forge a distinctive identity and how they strive for that elusive balance between professional and personal life. – Tony Miksanek, MD – See more at: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/reviews/102#sthash.A14VwFJg.dpuf

—JAMA Review

“Full of quiet wisdom”

Many of these pieces are full of quiet wisdom. There are no real heroics here, not in the ‘jumping on the chest’ kind of way. One writer admits, with self-deprecatory humor, to the fears that threaten to overwhelm her in the practise of her medical skills, but she goes on regardless. Another describes how medical knowledge is a shifting thing; there was once a time we knew nothing of AIDS. […]

There are some less interesting essays, and one or two that try too hard to be clever, but generally this is an excellent collection. The standard of writing is very high, perhaps not surprising considering the editor is Lee Gutkind […] – Sue Bond

– See more at: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/reviews/103#sthash.T6Vs1lrI.dpuf

—Metapsychology