Doctors in the making Memoirs and medical education

Encompassing an almost overwhelming-and ever-growing-volume of scientific knowledge, medical education in recent decades has grappled increasingly with the humanistic side of studies in an era of growing and challenging diversities. Patient-physician communication, medical ethics, professionalism, nondiscrimination, and accountability represent only a few of the qualities that medical pedagogy is attempting to navigate and introduce into an already scientifically demanding and overcrowded curriculum. Poirier (literature & medical education, emerita, Univ. of Illinois Coll. of Medicine) here brings together the prevailing rubrics that medical educators are seeking to incorporate into the teaching/training of physicians. She analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and blogs of physicians-in-training to link the curriculum to medical students' and residents' abilities to feel and express compassion toward their patients as well as to their own developing maturity and professionalism. Medical educators and those in the health-care arena will find a great deal of information particularly relevant to their interests in this somewhat unevenly and awkwardly written work on integrating humanism into medicine.-James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.