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

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.""