Customer Reviews

Harvard Med: The Story Behind America's Premier Medical School and the Making of America's Doctors

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After I read the book "Becoming a doctor," I became interested in reading books about medical students. So I started reading this book. I have to say that I am disappointed about its content. Although the author declared in the beginning that this is not a book about any particular medical students, I still expected that he would actually tell us some inside stories about Harvard Med.
From all I can remember, he only talked about orientation day, cadaver dissection period, then graduation day. It happens at all other medical schools. Other than the superficial things, he could have spent some time on explaining and exploring the extra materials that Harvard Med provides. I still do not know much about how the students at Harvard are learning medicine. What makes Harvard's teaching so different and so much better than other medical schools? He failed to explain it.
This content doesn't really fit with the book title.
Some of the chapters are not really related to Harvard Med. It has quite a few intensive personal interviews. However, it seems that the author were using those people to express his own views about the impersonal services HMOs that are taking quality patient time which doctors may provide. That is all he talks about, and there was no other kinds of opinions that those doctors, students were expressing. And this part of the conversation is over expressed in this book.
Overall, it is not all about Harvard med. It is really just a collection of random Harvard Med articles.

This book about Harvard Med by a medical columnist in the area, sure enough, imparts a lot of information about Harvard Med.
But along the way it suffers from being cumbersome and somewhat disjointed -- the author constantly flips back and forth between the history of Harvard Med, the stories of graduates, the stories of students, the stories of professors, and discussions of research medicine vs. specialization vs. general practice. Mixed in with these are the author's own experiences -- as a neighborhood boy visiting the campus, and as a coddled medical columnist who was allowed to audit the med school's fundamental gross anatomy class, and whose every ail is treated by the country's leading Harvard doctors.
After reading the book you'll know more about Harvard Med, but you'll probably see your doctor for dizziness.

John Langone writes about the history of medicine and the state of the profession today. Excellent reading for anyone interested in a career in medicine.

A relief to see that this bastion of American medical education is as flawed as any other institution. Fascinating look "behind-the- scenes". (Made me just as glad that I'll be attending medical school elsewhere!)