BECOMING A DOCTOR... Provocative, irreverent, and useful writings from the front lines of medicine

THINKING OF BECOMING A DOCTOR? ---------------------- This site is dedicated to helping you find your way as you proceed on the path of becoming a doctor...from books about applying to medical school to stories from the front lines of American medicine ...everything you need to prepare yourself mentally for the excitement and rigors of the way ahead of you. Links to the most useful books on Amazon.com, and excerpts of great doctor stories...

Home PreMed Portal Becomingadoctor   Bookstore EXCERPTS:   Stone Babies   Battles of Life and     Death   Loving Touches   A Family of Doctors This site created by David Hellerstein, MD www.Hellerstein.net Comments? Send MAIL here!

SEX Touching   An award-winning essay about the gynecology clinic...a patient in pain, an impatient older doctor, and a student who doesn't know how to react. A med student learns the hard way how to be a good doctor DEATH The Battle for the Dead What is the story of the gold ball? Secrets how doctors get patients' families to agree to autopsies. LOVE Loving Touches--a novel by David Hellerstein Young doctor-in- training Pete Roth faces the chaos of life in a Manhattan psychiatric hospital... and encounters a surprise that will change his life. POLITICS Stone Babies Dr. Jay Sones has trained in infertility treatment at Manhattan Medical Center...now he is going out into the real world to begin practice. But his mentor, the great Dr. Leon Wiss has turned against him, and his partner Dr. Alli Daniels is in the hospital, having been brutally attacked while working in the laboratory... An excerpt from the new novel Stone Babies, NOW AVAILABLE from Electronpress.com. HISTORY A Family of Doctors Excerpt from a history of American medicine as seen through the 150-year history of 5 generations of one family of doctors...the Civil War to the present. GREAT READS Becoming a Doctor Bookstore My favorite suggestions about the experience of becoming a doctor...by someone who has been there! MORE... More excerpts...death and dying, dedication, women in medicine, and more!

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Are you in the midst of applying to medical school?  It is just the first part of the very long and intense process of becoming a doctor!  There is the practical side of getting into med school...what premed courses to take, how to brush up on your knowledge so you have a maximal chance of acing the MCATs...and you can take a look at our Premed Portal to get hints of the practical side (how to write the best essays, where to take MCAT review courses, how to get med school application software, what books to buy and so on).  

But there is also the philosophical side...the literary side...and the experiental side of medicine.  What is is like to be a doctor?  How do you best survive medical school?  What is it like when you first deal with the death of a patient you have cared for over weeks or months?  Call it medical humanities, or medicine and literature, or the experience of doctoring.  In this web site, Becomingadoctor.com, you can read excerpts from award-winning writings from Dr. David Hellerstein. Dr. Hellerstein has published several books, including Battles of Life and Death (essays), Loving Touches (novel), A Family of Doctors (a history of American medicine as seen through the 5 generations of doctors in his family), and the new e-novel, Stone Babies.  His writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper's, North American Review, Fiction, Hippocrates, and The Sciences, and has been excerpted widely, including the much-acclaimed anthology, On Doctoring, edited by Richard Reynolds, and in Edward Tufte's classic Envisioning Information.

Whether describing the excitement of participating in cardiac surgery, or the intensity of working with a young patient with a kidney transplant, or the struggle of working with poverty-stricken children in the wards of the county hospital, or the struggle to cure post-partum psychosis, or the doctor's difficulty of dealing with "iatrogenic disease"--disease caused by treatment itself, or whether describing how doctors worked over 50 years ago, Dr. Hellerstein's writings can give you an intense, true-to-life exposure to the way medicine is really practiced!

We are always trying to improve our site, Becomingadoctor.com.  If you have suggestions of how we can make Becomingadoctor.com better, whether books that you think we should recommend for our Becomingadoctor Bookstore, or other web-sites that we should add to our Premed Portal, please drop a note to us!

And best of luck in your efforts toward becoming a doctor!

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