[.ca] White Coat: Becoming a Doctor at Harvard Medical School (ISBN 0688175899)

From Amazon.com:
Books about the education of physicians are so plentiful they practically constitute their own subgenre. For starters, there's Melvin Konner's Becoming a Doctor, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure by Perri Klass, and several books by Robert Marion (including Learning to Play God, Rotations, and The Intern Blues). Joining the field is Ellen Lerner Rothman with a memoir of her years at Harvard Medical School. It's a workman-like account of learning the art and science of medicine in the era of HMOs, in which paperwork seems to have replaced healing as the main product of hospital bureaucracy. Rothman wrestles with the dilemmas of compassion and objectivity as she encounters patients, learns procedures, and prepares to don the white coat that symbolizes physician competence in a world of backless patient gowns. Of particular interest are Rothman's accounts of the rabid fan base among medical students for a certain top-rated medical TV drama; they study its jargon almost as exhaustively as they review the physiology of the heart. "It was just like on ER," she notes following an encounter with a traumatic cardiac arrest that ended with the patient's death. The lines between pop culture and science are ever blurred. --Patrizia DiLucchio

being a medical student:
It starts good with feelings, expectations, experiences but towards the end it becomes more like ER show, personal feelings seems to disappear. I was more interested reading about actual thrill that was felt rather than how the patients felt, but still gave me an understanding of being in medical school and difficult life it brings. I liked the way she described the obgyn experience but others was like textbook explaining the problems. First years experiences was very short, the process and procedures was not clear, I still do not get from the book when you start rotations, when you become resident, what is expected from you, what happenes if you do not perform.

Very slow and not that interesting...yawn....:
After reading numerous true-life medical stories this one has to be the most uninteresting of them all! Read something by another author of real-life medicine, this one is worth leaving on the shelf.

Disjointed and Random:
I hate to be harsh on the author, but this book was WAY too disjointed in its writing. First, I expected a detailed account of what it is like to be trained as a doctor at one of America's premier medical schools. Books such as this interest me, as I may never train to be a doctor (likewise, the book "Boot" is a great tome that goes through Marine Corp boot camp from beginning to end.) Instead, in "White Coat" there is basic and quick descriptions of what Harvard Medical School is like, followed suddenly by a random paragraph about dating a guy, or watching ER. Her entire first year--what I would imagine would be an amazing experience of first-time medical learning and wonders-- covers less than 36 pages! This, in a book of 331 pages? Chapters are actually topics: AIDS, Difficult Patients, Pelvic Exams, etc. The problem is that the reader never quite feels that we are progressing with her from day to day, month to month, and year to year at Harvard. I never quite caught excatly when and how she was allowed to see patients. In one chapter, she was suddenly with her first patient. I want to read this book and really know what happens at the Harvard Medical School! It's her first book, and quite obviously she means well, but her book is really an amateur effort. She is probably a good doctor but her writing skills need much honing.

An Honest Reflection...:
Ellen Rothman displays honesty and grace in this fascinating look inside the medical school world. Not only does she carefully examine patients during her training, she also evaluates common beliefs about what it means to be a doctor, sometimes pessimistically so. The only drawback to the book was the lack of insight into the financing of tuition and living expenses during medical school. I got the impression from her three international trips during medical school that she did not have to worry about money, which is rare for medical students.