Becoming a Doctor

January 25, 2010
Here’s the invaluable insight patients so often miss from doctors —revelations that expose the person underneath the white coat as not just capable but vulnerable and all too human. Gutkind, founder of the journal Creative Nonfiction
and editor of numerous volumes of creative nonfiction, selects 19 men and women who bravely, and often lyrically, demonstrate that they are “ordinary people engaged in an extraordinary profession.” Perri Klass explains why she tries to teach her medical students that “clinical medicine is all about stories.” Zaldy S. Tan writes of how helping a beloved and very ill grandmother cured him of the smugness residents feel toward elderly patients. And Abigail Zuger discovered an unruly, demanding patient was suddenly compliant “all because I once treated her like a person, not a patient.” In their stories, each physician confirms one simple, powerful truth, as noted by Pulitzer Prize–winner Robert Coles: it is “important to be a scientist who knows how to listen, how to think, and how to express himself as clearly as possible.”