Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

Sandeep Jauhar

Dec 2007 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Intern is Sandeep Jauhar's story of his days and nights in residency at a busy hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question our every assumption about medical care today. Residency—and especially the first year, called internship—is legendary for its brutality. Working eighty hours or more per week, most new doctors spend their first year asking themselves why they wanted to be doctors in the first place.

Jauhar's internship was even more harrowing than most: he switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a more humane calling—only to find that medicine put patients' concerns last. He struggled to find a place among squadrons of cocky residents and doctors. He challenged the practices of the internship in The New York Times, attracting the suspicions of the medical bureaucracy. Then, suddenly stricken, he became a patient himself—and came to see that today's high-tech, high-pressure medicine can be a humane science after all.

Now a thriving cardiologist, Jauhar has all the qualities you'd want in your own doctor: expertise, insight, a feel for the human factor, a sense of humor, and a keen awareness of the worries that we all have in common. His beautifully written memoir explains the inner workings of modern medicine with rare candor and insight.

Ratings and reviews

I am only half way through this amazing book. It should be required reading for EVERYONE, because I have worked as an RN for almost 40 years, and I can tell you, everything he is saying is the TRUTH. At my large, very famous teaching center, billions of dollars are wasted on futile, painful degrading treatments, instead of focusing on prevention, effective treatment in the early stages of diseases and palliation/hospice. I also lay some of the responsibility at the feet of Americans. Instead of exerting their wills to exercise, stop smoking and drinking excessively, and to eat well, they have bought into a lifestyle of indulgence, thinking that the medical system will provide a pill or procedure to correct the inevitable health problems that ensue. He writes well, and I sense that he is a caring physician. As I said before, EVERYONE should read this book

Glad I read this book. Author is very honest about the realities of internship and residencies. Thank You

About the author

Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, is the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He writes regularly for The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine. He lives with his wife and their son in New York City.