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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.
“Professor Chris Ward has spent a lifetime finding ways to help his patients flourish in the face of extraordinary disability and suffering. His book explores the difficulties and the rewards of this work, and pours decades of thoughtful reflection into just a few pages. For patients, it will change the way they think about medicine, science and rehabilitation for the better; for clinicians, it’s an imaginative inspiration and will prove a precious resource.” —Gavin Francis, General Practitioner, Author of Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence.
“This shrewd and humane palaeobiography of becoming a doctor – personal but universal, dense but luminous – is utterly enthralling and deeply discerning. It traces the metamorphosis of a medical student of the 1960s into an astute retrospectator of what it is to be a doctor and to do doctoring through 50 years of momentous professional change and personal transformation.” —Lawrence Trevelyan Weaver, Emeritus Professor of Child Health, University of Glasgow, author of White Blood – A History of Human Milk.
“Becoming a Doctor is a splendid book – nuanced and erudite, wry and humane, wise and narratively compelling. It can be read from beginning to end or dipped into like a generous box of chocolates. I savoured it and learned a great deal from it. It will reward a wide readership – from medical educators and students to anyone curious about the making of a doctor.” —Kevin Harvey, Associate Professor, author of The Literary Lifeline, School of English, University of Nottingham, UK.
Christopher D Ward is Emeritus Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, and also a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist. His most recent book is Between Sickness and Health: The Landscape of Illness and Wellness (2020).
Preface; CHAPTER 1 Introduction; PART 1 Ways of Knowing; CHAPTER 2 Formation; CHAPTER 3 Anatomising; CHAPTER 4 The Cosmos; CHAPTER 5 Then as Now; PART 2 Practice; CHAPTER 6 Credibility; CHAPTER 7 Connecting; CHAPTER 8 Diagnosis; CHAPTER 9 Treatment; CHAPTER 10 Learning, Teaching and Letting Know; Notes; Index