Becoming a Doctor

Becoming a Doctor describes what it feels like to be transformed from a naïve student into a professorial physician. This very personal ‘re-membering’ evokes the joys, absurdities and frustrations of medical work. The author observes his younger self’s efforts to regulate feelings and to communicate with patients and colleagues in prescribed ways. The relationships with patients he describes often feel like performances in which the doctor’s self need play little part. Other ways of being a doctor are hard to imagine within a hospital, where patients’ day-to-day concerns are invisible. Doctors in the 1960s, as now, were more focused on disease than on illness or suffering. They avoided thinking about death and were curiously silent about healing, recovery or rehabilitation. Becoming a Doctor shows how difficult it is for a young person to resist the pressures of history and culture. These pressures are described from the inside, along with medicine’s often puzzling pleasures.