Poirier has written a book that will appeal to a wider audience curious about medical writing and a text that will speak to the heart of what medical education struggles with today. It is scholarly and immensely readable, inclusive and critical. “Suzanne Poirier’s Doctors in the Making is a critical and insightful addition to the canon of scholarly work in medical memoir.

Her portrait of the medical student’s acquisition of professional identity is subtle and complex, registering its psychological, ethical, and even physiological dimensions.”-Paul John Eakin, author, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative “Drawing on more than forty memoirs by students and doctors, Suzanne Poirier offers the lay reader an eye-opening insider’s account of medical education and what’s wrong with it, notably the lack of attention paid to ‘the emotional process of becoming a physician.’ If these stories reveal the shortcomings of medical training, they also point the way to reform, for Poirier persuades us the act of storytelling, incorporated into medical curricula, can promote the emotional wholeness of physicians in the time to come. The scholarship is exemplary, the work impressive, and the sum total made me want to rummage around for my old picket sign.”-Kathryn Montgomery, Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine There is nothing like this book that I know of and, though Suzanne Poirier gives careful attention to establishing the validity of narratives as data, the appeal of memoirs and autobiographies is great enough to be very persuasive to its readers.

Doctors in training book