Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School

by Howard S. Becker

 

Chekhov’s Doctors: A Collection of Chekhov's Medical Tales

by Anton Chekhov

Hot Lights, Cold Steel : Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years

by Michael J. Collins

 

Review from Amazon.com:

If he didn't feel overwhelmed before the Mayo Clinic senior orthopedic surgery resident lobbed a beeper at him with the nonchalant order, "Cover for me," 29-year-old ex-cabdriver, ex-construction worker, and, at the time, brand-new resident Collins certainly did then. It was his first day on the job, and instantly he began fielding calls from staff nurses requesting orders for patients he hadn't laid eyes on. If it hadn't been for his innate sense of humor--brilliantly demonstrated in this memoir of his Mayo residency--and a sense of perspective derived from that experience, he might have failed.

Becoming a Physician : A Practical and Creative Guide to Planning a Career in Medicine

by Jennifer Danek

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Here, at last, is the book that will help you realize your dream of a career in medicine. Whether your goal is to work in a busy city hospital ER, as a country doctor, or in research, here you'll find innovative ways to actively plan and tailor your medical school education to meet your specific needs.

The Pact

by Sampson Davis, George Jenkins and Rarneck Hunt

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Growing up in broken homes in a crime-ridden area of Newark, N.J., these three authors could easily have followed their childhood friends into lives of drug-dealing, gangs and prison. They tell harrowing stories of being arrested for assault and mugging drug dealers, and of the lack of options they saw as black teenagers. But when their high school was visited by a recruiter from a college aimed at preparing minority students for medical school, the three friends decided to make something of their lives. Through the rigors of medical and dental school, and a brief detour into performing rap music at local clubs, they supported each other. Today, Davis and Hunt are doctors, and Jenkins is a dentist; the men's Three Doctors Foundation funds scholarships to give other poor black kids the same opportunities.

 

The Cost-Effective Use of Leeches and Other Musings of a Medical School Survivor

by Jeff Drayer

 

Book Description from Amazon.com:

A witty satire that chronicles one student's journey through medical school...a hilarious insider's guide to information they won't tell you in the interview.

Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside

by Kartina Firlik

 

Review from Amazon.com:

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to wonder what it's like to poke around beneath somebody's cranium. It does take a brain surgeon, however, to explain what makes a person want to drill into another person's skull. At that Firlik excels in her sometimes grisly, sometimes amusing (in a dark-humorous way), always informative, personal (father was a surgeon), and professional ("part scientist, part mechanic") story of becoming a neurosurgeon. In many ways she is what you might expect, but in others she is the rarest of the rare. There are a mere 4,500 neurosurgeons in the U.S., and a scant 5 percent of them are women. While Firlik has had some of the predictable and standard hassles and worries (what to wear to a job interview?), she has never had to storm out of a room because of male chauvinism. From a day-in-the-life sketch of a neurosurgery residency to an astonishing report on a performance-enhancing procedure to improve brain function, Firlik maintains a highly personal and engaging style.

A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student

by Perri Klass

 

Review from Amazon.com:

As a Harvard medical student in 1982, Klass became a contributor to the New York Times "Hers" column; this is a collection of the author's diary-like essays describing her medical training, her life as a lover, a woman and a mother. The accounts are informed by the artistry Klass displays in her fiction, Recombinations and I Am Having an Adventure. Writing personally and candidly, she brings the reader into her orbit, into the experiences of a thoughtful person, in situations that are comic, difficult, puzzling and often tragic. There are moving instances of a doctor's mandated objectivity while involved with the dying and with the bereaved. In lighter moments, Klass twits pompous members of the healing profession and offers insights on the status of women doctors; they are frequently mistaken for nursesmen never are.

Baby Doctor

by Perri Klass

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Here the pediatrian who wrote A Not Entirely Benign Procedure delivers a riveting, sometimes wry account of her pediatric residency. Klass's metamorphosis from insecure medical intern to confident practitioner begins during her first night on call in the neonatal intensive care unit of a Massachusetts hospital, where, surrounded by preemies in incubators, she is so frantic with the awesome responsibility that she finds herself unable even to fill out an X-ray form correctly. We get a colorful, candid view of the exhausting, exhilarating and dehumanizing resident subculture, as in "Did you feel that mass in room 8?" or "Wheezer asthmatic in the E.R.!" There are snapshots of sapped interns crying in bathrooms; of young patients who know as much about their maladies as the interns do; of teens doomed with cystic fibrosis flirting with each other in the hallways; of pediatric AIDS sufferers. Klass also reflects, as a more experienced physician, on such questions as whether women make better doctors than men do (she says yes) and what parents should do when prenatal tests predict birth defects. An inspiring coming-of-age story and an inside look at medical education.

Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School

by Melvin Konner, MD

 

Review from Amazon.com:

The author started medical school in his mid-30s, having already established himself as a researcher and professor of anthropology. He focuses on the third year of medical school, for that is when the aspiring physician gets his or her first extensive exposure to patients. Highly critical of medical education and practice, particularly the fostering of detachment toward patients, he admits that current suggestions for improvement stand little hope of adoption. Perhaps most telling is his decision not to go into a residency but rather to return to anthropology. Konner's evident maturity and broad experience enable him to present a wider-angled look at medical education than most such reports; thus his criticism is particularly convincing.

Life After Medical School: Thirty-two Doctors Describe How They Shaped Their Medical Careers

by Leonard Laster, MD

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Directed to medical students as a guide to choosing their disciplines, the overarching theme here is, "Physician, know thyself," with 32 of them reminiscing about their backgrounds and why they chose their specialties and discussing their daily work. The pieces are written as first-person narratives, fashioned by Laster, founder and chancellor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, who conducted the interviews so deftly that self-revealing personalities emerge. Readers discern connections between specialty and character; those who treat, say, HIV and cancer patients sound especially sensitive, while the pathologist and radiologist, who have little ongoing patient contact, seem to be more interested in medicine as science. The physicians include women and African Americans and run the gamut from psychiatrists (among them, Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac) to surgeons and pediatricians. Also here are physicians who no longer practice, such as Howard Dean, governor of Vermont, and Arnold Relman, editor-in-chief emeritus of the New England Journal of Medicine. Many of the physicians are strongly critical of interference from insurers in the doctor-patient relationship, yet only one physician here practices with an HMO, an area that should have been more fully explored.

The Intern Blues

by Robert Marion, MD

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Using the diary entries of three interns at a medical teaching facility in New York City, the author depicts the rite of passage from self-doubt, frustration, anxiety, and immaturity to personal and professional growth that occurs during the first year of post-graduate medicine. Interspersed throughout are the author's own entries, which provide background information on the interns, medical techniques and advances, hospital organization and politics, and proposed changes in medical education. The diary format effectively dramatizes the often agonizing decisions and compromises that are made in the face of sleepless nights and inexperience. This will be an important book for anyone contemplating the long, arduous task of becoming a doctor.

Learning to Play God

by Robert Marion, MD

 

Review from Amazon.com:

A no-frills look at medical training that places the process--from acceptance into medical school through internship and residency--in a clear and sobering light. Marion explains technical terms so that readers become as involved in patients' progress as if they were part of the medical team. His easy, engaging style, plus the detective element that is part of diagnosis, makes this book impossible to put down. The author condemns the system that requires interns to put in 100-120 hour work weeks, which robs patients of quality care while stripping eager, idealistic medical people of their humanity and compassion. He advocates change, but his love of the profession, his personal warmth, and his skill come through in this narrative. He does not want to discourage prospective doctors, but he does want to make their paths more humane.

White Coat: Becoming a Doctor at Harvard Medical School

by Ellen Lerner Rothman

 

Review from Amazon.com:

When Rothman donned her fresh white coat on her first day of orientation at Harvard Medical School, she assumed a complex new identity. To patients, the white coat meant medical authority, whereas to Rothman it represented "a power that I was not ready to accept." Written with admirable candor and insight, her account of how she grew into her white coat during the four-year program will interest the mix of general and professional readers who enjoyed Perri Klass's similar memoir, Not an Entirely Benign Procedure. Rothman, who is now a resident in the combined pediatrics program at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston City Hospital, begins with first-year anxieties associated with classes and working on cadavers. She honestly confronts the competitiveness among her classmates and the difficulty of balancing a demanding schedule with personal relationships. She explores the excitement and glamour of being a doctor while acknowledging the awesome responsibility it entails: "I must be above human fallacy.... My mistakes and failures could have catastrophic consequences." She also writes with great sensitivity about the first patient she touches, the obnoxious patient she feels guilty for disliking, the pain of having to tell a man he has cancer and the stress and humiliation of being grilled by senior doctors. Anecdotes about herself and her classmates (they are addicted to the TV series E.R.) also add flavor to her account. Rothman ends her book admitting that, although she is now comfortable in her white coat, "I will never finish growing into my role as doctor and caregiver."

 

House of God

by Samuel Sharn

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Wildly funny...  frightening... outrageous, moving... a story of  modern medicine rarely, if, ever told.

 

Let Me Listen to your Heart: A Compilation of Writings by Third Year Medical Students

by David Svahn, MD

What I learned in Medical School: Personal Stories of Young Doctors

by K.M. Takakuwa, Nick Rubashkin and Karen Herzig

 

Review from Amazon.com:

Poignant and revealing, this eclectic collection of short personal essays serves two complementary purposes. On one level, it recounts the challenges and joys medical students experience as they go through their training. On another, it critiques what these students must endure to become doctors-a grueling educational process that entails constant stress and exceedingly long work hours. Pulled together by Takakuwa (a physician at the Univ. of Pennsylvania), Rubashkin (a medical student at Stanford) and Herzig (a researcher at the Univ. of California, San Francisco) the 22 essays reflect the profession's increased cultural and socioeconomic diversity. For example, Eddy V. Nguyen, an ophthalmology resident at the UCLA Medical Center, describes how becoming a doctor helped him embrace his experiences as a Vietnamese refugee and gave him the chance to improve the conditions of Asian immigrants living in a nearby, under-served community. Melanie M. Watkins, an OB-GYN resident at UCSF who became a single mother at 16, talks honestly about how hospitals often neglect young mothers on Medicaid and explains that what keeps her nose in her books until 2 a.m. is "not the prestige and recognition that goes with being a doctor, but the promise of a better life for myself and my son and the potential to make a real difference in the lives of my patients." The editors conclude the anthology with a sharp analysis of the medical education system as it currently stands, citing ways in which the competitive-and at times isolating-environment should be improved. As former surgeon general Elders explains in her foreword, "this book is by no means the definitive word on the direction medicine is taking; but it is a starting point for getting to know the new faces in medicine, a starting point for discussion, and...for action."

On Call: A Doctor’s Days and Nights in Residency

by Emily R. Transue

 

Review from Amazon.com:

During her three years as a resident in internal medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, Transue wrote about her patients as a way to guard against burnout and share her experiences with friends and family. This moving collection of her stories conveys vividly, sometimes painfully, the atmosphere of overwork, exhaustion and insecurity in which a resident works; the long shifts and sleepless nights, the moments when she cannot contain her tears, the times when she is haunted by fears that she has made the wrong decision. But she never loses sympathy for her patients—the heart attack victim who regrets not remembering his near-death experience, the old woman who has a pet name for her walker, the psychotic who imagines he is in constant pain and just wants her to hold his hand, even the grumpy man with emphysema who smokes two packs a day and complains about the treatment he has to receive as a result, and the habitual drunks lined up every night on stretchers in a back hallway. It's reassuring to read that a doctor isn't afraid to express compassion for her patients and that she is eager to listen and learn as they talk about their hopes and fears. There are many touching moments here, especially when she's reminded by a patient who is dying that it's important to look out the window and enjoy the view on a sunny day. Her descriptions of medical procedures can be graphic, but she presents an intriguing picture of a side of medicine many people never see.

What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Students Journey

by Audrey Young, MD

 

Review from Amazon.com:

A firsthand depiction of the hardships and rewards of medical school, this sensitive memoir may serve as a guide to help readers who are considering traversing that same path. Young's schooling taught her that "everything important comes from the patient's story." She predicates her perceptive memoir on just this lesson, as she exposes the unique life of a physician-to-be and the human chronicle behind the diseases she struggles to treat. Young's narrative takes the reader through her medical school rotations, where she describes such events as the helicopter evacuation of a dying man from an Eskimo village in Aniak, Alaska; her own near-fainting during a childbirth in Spokane, Washington; and the death of a Pocatello, Idaho, baby born with a rare disease. Young dissects the histories of these patients-almost all poor and mostly from rural settings-and reveals not only their medical dilemmas, but their personal and socioeconomic ones. Despite her sometimes over-earnest tone and the use of some medical terminology, most of her reflections are poignant, such as when she describes her "resigned solitude" amidst 36-hour, sleep-deprived shifts. Still, her medical accounts are the memoir's true highlights, and her stint through AIDS-ravished Swaziland offers the most captivating and heartbreaking chapter, providing a glimpse of the state of health in that Third World African country, and its disturbing implications for humanity.