Description
In this deeply human memoir, Audrey Young uses her skills as a keen observer of people and recorder of details to track her development as a doctor and, ultimately, as a person. She chronicles her experiences as a medical student in the most remote regions of the American West and Africa and it is in these remote areas where Young’s education truly begins. A baby’s rapid deterioration, a terminal cancer patient’s refusal of treatment, clinics where AIDS and tuberculosis are everyday realities from these crises the author draws the hardest lessons of all, the ones only patients can teach. Young’s graceful prose captures the immediacy and emotional complexity of lives in distress. Her quiet sensitivity and intuition, qualities that make great doctors and writers alike, shine throughout this work.
Read More
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.
Read Less