The number of physicians leaving clinical practice is skyrocketing, even as the push to “teach” professionalism in medical education still sometimes translates as just another reason to disparage those who recognize their personal needs. Still, there's no doubting that this book speaks to the contemporary era of medical training and practice. It's an idea that would probably make the profession's old guard shudder: Patients aren't here to serve our personal needs, the thinking goes. Jauhar's path through medical training becomes so personal at times that he adopts his own patients as his mirror: In your patients you can find yourself, he suggests. The writing here is unflinchingly raw, even with 10 years' hindsight. It is this clarity and honesty that make Intern a true contribution to the burgeoning literature of medical training. There's no bullying his way through the hard times, no glossing over his medical school buddy's suicide during intern year.

Many trainees will recognize their own journey in Jauhar's account, thanks to the author's candid and sympathetic treatment of this dark side of doctoring. Eventually, because of a neck injury, he must ask for time off from internship. When internship begins to close in around him, midway through the year, he becomes clinically depressed. Jauhar himself brooded and struggled with uncertainty, not convinced that he picked right with internal medicine. There's the bumpy courtship with his now-wife Sonia, also a physician in training. There's the older brother – a breezy establishment type – who he admires, yet doesn't. There's the difficult immigrant father whom the author can't ever seem to please. However, Intern, unlike many of its predecessors, is also the compelling story of a young man whose medical career colors every corner of his life. Except for an incisive description of the night-float experience, this sort of thing has been done before, perhaps most memorably in Emily Transue's first book, On Call. At first glance Intern appears to offer much of the usual fodder, like stories of a young physician's discomfort with breaking bad news, his attempts to coax a Do Not Resuscitate order from a reluctant family, and the anxiety over running a Code Blue.

A recent addition to this literature of medical training is Intern: A Doctor's Initiation, cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar's story of his residency at New York Hospital, New York, NY, in the late 1990s.

Who hasn't written their memoir of becoming a doctor? The books are coming fast and furious these days.

Sandeep jauhar books