The Soul of a Doctor

By the time most of us meet our doctors, they ve been in practice for a number of years. Often they seem aloof, uncaring, and hurried. Of course, they re not all like that, and most didn t start out that way. Here are voices of third-year students just as they begin to take on clinical responsibilities. Their words focus on the odd transition students face when they must deal with real people in real time and in real crises and when they must learn to put aside their emotions to make quick, accurate, and sensitive decisions. Their decisions aren t always right, and the consequences can be life-altering for all involved. Moving, disturbing, and candid, their true stories show us a side of the profession that few ever see, or could even imagine. They show, often painfully, how medical students grow up, right at the bedside.

“Medical schooling's decades-long focus on the science rather than the art of doctoring seems to be shifting. Doctors and their teachers are again recognizing that there is more to patient care than pages of numbers and medical images. The change isn't proceeding rapidly, though; indeed, one of the med-student contributors to this book notes being told, "The patient's history is totally worthless." The good news is that medical schools are beginning to adjust. In Harvard's patient-doctor course, students are required not only to work on the wards but also to write essays about their experiences. The results may be as surprising to them as it is sadly predictable to many patients. After viewing himself in a videotaped interview with a patient, one young man estimated that it had taken him only months to go from being "Mr. Empathy" to being "Dr. Jerk." One can almost hear the idea bulbs ignite as these students wrestle with issues of communication, empathy, and easing suffering and loss.--Booklist”

GORDON HARPER, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist, is the director of the Patient-Doctor curricula at Harvard Medical School and the recipient of the Award for Teaching Excellence from the Child Psychiatry Fellows at Children s Hospital of Boston.SACHIN H. JAIN is a third-year medical student at Harvard. He is a tutor in medicine and public policy and has been awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, and the Galbraith Fellowship.SUSAN PORIES, M.D., a breast cancer surgeon and a surgical educator and investigator, has been named one of America s top surgeons and is a scholar in the Academy at Harvard Medical School.

You're in a hospital trying for the first time to be a doctor. No more textbook diagrams and classroom cadavers; this is the real thing, in real time. You've got a patient who's convinced that her illness is the same one that she saw once on Oprah and is turning down all other tests. A young woman is being told she'll have to sacrifice one baby to save the other. And you just told another patient she might have cancer but left her panicked when you had to rush off. How do you handle all this and stay sane, and then somehow become a good doctor? Here are candid firsthand accounts of the profound experiences that transform medical students into doctors--for better or worse--right at the bedside.

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