From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
People are drawn to the medical profession for a plethora of reasons that usually have something to do with curing the sick or making sweeping social changes that enable individuals to enjoy better health and have improved access to medical care. Young confesses that her own motivation borrowed on all these themes. As she began medical school, she envisioned herself one day working in a big city's tough inner core, a champion of medical aid to the urban poor. The University of Washington Medical School, however, held a different promise for the idealistic medical hopeful. Young became involved in the school's rural internship program, which sent her to the remotest reaches of Alaska, Wyoming, and even South Africa. She candidly shares how reality collided with naive expectations when a chronically ill patient selected job over health, when she could only watch helplessly while a man died, and when she had to conduct wartime triage in a vain attempt to stretch an insufficient supply of pharmaceuticals. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Do sleek high-tech hospitals teach more about medicine and less about humanity? Do doctors ever lose their tolerance for suffering? With sensitive observation and graceful prose, this book explores some of the difficult and deeply personal questions a 23-year-old doctor confronts with her very first dying patient, and continues to struggle with as she strives to become a good doctor. In her travels, the doctor attends to terminal illness, AIDS, tuberculosis, and premature birth in small rural communities throughout the world. What Patients Taught Me is a compelling memoir of the emotional complexity of treating patients when their lives hang in the balance.
What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Student's Journey FROM THE PUBLISHER
Do sleek high-tech hospitals teach more about medicine and less about humanity? Do doctors ever lose their tolerance for suffering? With sensitive observation and graceful prose, this book explores some of the difficult and deeply personal questions a 23-year-old doctor confronts with her very first dying patient, and continues to struggle with as she strives to become a good doctor. In her travels, the doctor attends to terminal illness, AIDS, tuberculosis, and premature birth in small rural communities throughout the world. What Patients Taught Me is a compelling memoir of the emotional complexity of treating patients when their lives hang in the balance.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Straightforward account of Young's time in a program that apprentices students to rural physicians. The author, now a staff physician at the University of Washington, was a medical student there when she learned of WWAMI, a program that exposes medical students to rural medicine in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Her first placement was a month-long tour of duty in a remote Eskimo outpost where the standard garb for doctors consisted of jeans, hiking boots, and a stethoscope; her first lessons came mainly from watching and listening. Subsequently, she did hospital rotations in Pocatello, Idaho (pediatrics), and Missoula, Montana (internal medicine). With each assignment, Young's responsibilities increased and she became more of a participant in patient care. She learned the art of connecting with patients and the importance of listening to their stories. By the end of her third year, in love with medicine as she had seen it practiced and yearning to move beyond the rural Pacific Northwest, she took a residency position in South Africa. The lessons there were harsher. With resources extremely limited, HIV skyrocketing, and tuberculosis and diabetes widespread, Young found that doctors had to choose whom to help; the choice was often simply to help those who had a chance to survive. Overwhelmed by disease and death, she nevertheless completed her residency and returned as a full-fledged general internist to Seattle, where she took on the care of patients in a community of refugees and the homeless. WWAMI, Young avers, gave her "intense glimpses into the human experience" and taught her that the patient's story, the most human element in medical practice, is often thehighest reward of doctoring. As she puts it, "Sometimes I enter a story and find I can bring a little light and relief to human suffering."Welcome evidence that the art of medicine is still being taught and practiced in a world where technology has all the glamour. Agent: Max Gartenberg
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