Still Healing: A Doctor's Notes on the Magic and Misery of a Life in Medicine

The American view of doctors vacillates between seeing them as heroes with hearts of gold and nerves of steel and disparaging them as arrogant, callous, and careless. The truth lies between: Doctors are human beings with professional training that, at best, allows them to heal people and, at worst, to harm or even hasten death.

Rosalind Kaplan, a general internist, chose medicine as her career 35 years ago because she found the idea of life learning, a community of like-minded colleagues, a...