Becoming a Doctor

This book is a very personal account of a medical education that began in 1966. It describes one person's experience of being gradually transformed from a nervous student into a professorial physician.

A doctor's education looks at first sight like a straightforward technical training, but 're-membering' it as a personal experience creates a new and disturbing picture, a blend of joys, absurdities and frustrations. The author observes his younger self's efforts to communicate and to regulate feelings in the prescribed way, and begins to see that to become a doctor is to be at the mercy of almost irresistible pressures. He picks up habits by mimicking the teachers, with sometimes disastrous results.

Communication, and even empathy, are made to seem like performances in which the doctor's self need play no part. Any other way of being a doctor is unimaginable. Hospital medicine figures in the book as a universe that is loveable and yet tragically unable to engage with its patients' ordinary lives. Doctors in the 1960s, as now, were focused on disease and had little to say about illness and suffering, let alone death. They were, and still are, curiously silent about healing, recovery and rehabilitation.