Doctors

Just finished reading Doctors by Erich Segal. The first time i read it i was in Form 1 i think so it was quite a long time ago. Reading it again was awesome cause there were so many things i forgot and now it hits closer to home(in the sense that i'll be starting medical school soon). The book is incredibly 'real' in the way it depicts the situations and lives that doctor have to go through. I think the fact that Segal himself is a doctor makes the writing all the more accurate.

The novel tells the stories of a class of medical grads from Harvard from the time they start premed to their specialist years and so on. He writes about how they cope with all the pressure and how they handle social relationships while having to work hours on their job. The book was set during the 1950s onwards and in the prolougue the dean of med talks about how they only had the cure for 26 diseases. So at that time basically, there were so many things they didnt know how to treat.

One of the main characters Barney is a psychiatrist and he finds it shattering to find that most of those that need healing are his fellow doctors. So u get to read about all these 'wounded healers' and the pressure the public puts on them and so own. I think the books shows us that even a doctor spending his lifetime studying medicine may never truly understand it's mysteries. Like when the two main characters go through all means possible to save their child and when he survives they're not sure what was it that saved him. Whether it was the chinese healer they met, the new not FDA approved drug they tried or their own love.

" Med school provides perhaps the best substantiation for Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. For here we see it in its cruelest form the survival of the fittest. Not the smartest, as one would expect . But the fittest to cope with the inhuman pressures ,the demands made not only on the brain but on the psyche..." from DOCTORS