Abstract

During Abraham Nussbaum's first year of medical school, he participated in a white coat ceremony and was invested, literally, with a white coat that is symbolic of entry into the medical profession. He was also given a book, an anthology of writings on medicine that Nussbaum describes as having a "wistful quality" and being "engaging but reverential" ; the dust jacket featured a Norman Rockwell painting. He later went to a second-hand bookstore and traded the anthology for Abraham Verghese's 1994 memoir, My Own Country, an excerpt from which was in the anthology. For Nussbaum, struggling to figure out what it means to be a doctor, Verghese's writing "portrays the physician as the storyteller of his...