What Patients Taught Me
A Medical Student's Journey
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A young doctor writes frankly of her medical training in small rural communities around the world, reflecting on the important lessons she learned along the way
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 stunning book explores some of these difficult and deeply personal questions, revealing the highs and lows of being a physician in training.
Author Audrey Young was just 23-years-old when she took care of her first dying patient. In What Patients Taught Me, she writes of this life-altering experience and of the other struggles she faced in her journey to become a good doctor—from exhausting 36-hour shifts to a perilous rescue mission in an Eskimo village. As she travels to small rural communities throughout the world, she attends to terminal illness, AIDS, tuberculosis, and premature birth, coming face-to-face with mortality and the medical, personal, and socioeconomic dilemmas of her patients.
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.
