M.D.

Don't let the cover put you off -- Neil Ravin's M.D. is chock-full of good, hard medical details: patients, diseases, the life of interns and residents. I found it easy to skim past the protagonist's various romances with a patient, nurse, and fellow doctor. The characters are lifelike and varied, from the laid-back mellow California guy who wants to view his patients as whole people to the callous, driven New York-style residents who views his patients as diseased parts. The book is satisfying and surprisingly free of medical errors; I only wish the same could be said about Ravin's Informed Consent which contains so many medical errors one wonders where the editor was. Dated but delightful, M.D. will please those who like behind-the-scenes peeks at doctors' lives.

A wonderful, wonderful book--it ranks, without a doubt, among the top five books I have ever read. The author provides multi-faceted insights into the psyche of the protagonist, Ryan, a young and idealistic M.D., as he labors his way through morbidity, mortality and, not incongrously, romantic/sexual encounters. As with all good books, this one too can be read on many levels, with the reader obtaining whatever s/he wants from the book. As for myself: on completing the book, I was left with the realization that while it is impossible to completely live upto one's ideals, the continued possession of these ideals--even in the harsh light of "reality"--is necessary for the maintenance of one's humanity.

Published in 1981, before the appearance of AIDS, this saga of William Ryan's medical internship at the Manhattan Hospital and its sister institution, the Whipple Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, this diary like account puts the reader through the emotional ringer. Shedding the usual pop media images of doctors, the characterizations of the interns, residents and attendings are lean and convincing. These doctors are fallible, tired but not burnt out, feeling victimized, feeling abused, often overwhelmed by circumstances, by implacable disease, but not spiritually defeated. The better known House of God, is a paean of defeat, in which the interns at a Boston Hospital react to the inevitable defeats and heartbreaks of medical practice by rejecting the practice of medicine altogether, one by one opting out, for psychiatry or some other line of work outside medicine. The long nights and frustrations endured by MD's front line interns are no less harrowing (and at time funny) than those of the House of God, but MD's doctors come to the opposite conclusion: that despite the harrowing nights, the price paid by the interns and by all the hosptial staff, the work they do, the patients, is ultimately worthwhile, worth the sacrifice. The romantic interest--love affairs of very different stripes between Ryan and a patient with Hodgkins Disease, a nurse and ultimately (and most destructively) with Diana Hayes, MD the head of cardiac diagnostics, serve to highlight how people faced with intense conflicts will often pursue the hypersexual, zanily romantic diversion, just to keep from dropping off the precipice into cataonic depression. The sexual cavortings reverberate with those of Catch-22, serving as what they must be in life, a crazy affirmation of life among the dying. House of God catalogues all the legends passed down from generation to generation of interns, the "O" sign, the gomers, the whole panoply of stories every medical student hears. But MD is more than a catalogue of stories, it's a story given shape and substance, and ultimately an affirmation of man's desire to do work which helps, to try to do something that counts.