Becoming a Doctor: From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share Their Experiences - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393071561 ISBN 13: 9780393071566

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

Physicians recount true, personal stories from their professional lives in this inspired anthology by new and known writers.

In this poignant collection, doctors who are writers (and vice versa) relate their real-life journeys from intern to specialist, student to teacher, reflecting on the rewards, disillusionments, and triumphs encountered along the way. Featuring a wide array of distinguished voices, including Peter Kramer, Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Coles, Lauren Slater, Sandeep Jauhar, and Perri Klass, these original stories create a vivid mural of the medical world and provide invaluable insight for both doctors in training and longtime physicians. Becoming a Doctor portrays the broad arc of a doctor’s life, from a medical student’s uneasy first encounter with a cadaver and her realization that the experience’s redemption will lie ahead in the lives saved, to a resident’s reliance on dance during her grueling year in an inner-city hospital, and a veteran doctor’s profound ruminations on what it means to really listen to a patient’s story.

About this title

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.

From Booklist:

In this noteworthy yet somewhat uneven collection, journalist Gutkind assembles a chorus of 19 doctors who voice as many diverse features and phases of being or becoming a doctor. From pediatrician to professor, physician to psychoanalyst, the characteristics of each person’s story are at once unique to the medical profession (e.g., the medical student’s first encounter with dissection) and universal (e.g., an as-yet-undeclared geriatrician’s feelings of helplessness in the face of his grandmother’s illness). The authors hail from every corner of the country, and while all can legitimately claim that writing is at least a serious avocation, several are already published and even award-winning writers. Two things are distinctive here. One is that these insights embody a number of generally unvoiced challenges drawn from incidents within the trenches of the medical profession. The other is that the essay format forces pithy, laser-like exposure of self-analytical and thought-provoking perspectives that are certain to engage prospective medical practitioners as well as medically curious lay readers. --Donna Chavez

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393071561
• ISBN 13: 9780393071566
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Gutkind Lee