Synopses & Reviews
In this inspired anthology, doctors relate true stories from their professional lives, capturing disillusionments and triumphs encountered along the way. Essays by such distinguished writers as Peter D. Kramer, Kay Redfield Jamison, Danielle Ofri, Robert Coles, Lauren Slater, Sandeep Jauhar, and Perri Klass create a vivid mural of the medical world, from a student's uneasy first encounter with a cadaver to a veteran doctor's memories of the emotionally charged days and nights of residency.
Review
Medical students and medical professionals will enjoy these perspectives on their profession; they will likely encounter or have encountered many of the obstacles narrated.It seems unjust that a person should be endowed with a mind that can craft beautiful sentences and master all the information needed to graduate from medical school. But that’s the case with many of the physician writers in Becoming a Doctor. --Rachel Saslow
Review
[Gutkind] selects 19 men and women who bravely, often lyrically, demonstrate that they are ‘ordinary people engaged in an extraordinary profession.’Here, some of the best-known names in medical writing are joined by powerful new voices to help elucidate the mysterious and grueling transformation from non-doctor to doctor. Readers will gain insight into both the exuberance and disillusionment of physicians-in-training. A remarkable collection. --Christine Montross, M.D., author of Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab
Synopsis
"As wise as it is well written. . . . A sustaining work of art." --Linda Elisabeth Beattie,
About the Author
Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction and a pioneer in the field of narrative nonfiction. Gutkind is also the editor of In Fact and Becoming a Doctor, the author of Almost Human, and has written books about baseball, health care, travel, and technology. A Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University, he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Tempe, Arizona.