Stethoscope on Reality

Dr. Lessinger has written an extraordinary memoir about his life as a doctor, beginning with his life as a working-class Jew growing up in Brooklyn. He started in a three-generational family, with his immediate family and his grandparents who immigrated to New York from Eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms in the 1880s, who spoke Yiddish.

He documents his education as a striving, intelligent, upwardly mobile student in New York City public schools who went to Harvard College and NYU Medical School. He exposes the oppressive nature of medical training, from medical school through the years as an intern and resident. Overwork, exhaustion, humiliation in front of one's peers, and competition rather than cooperation were routine parts of his daily experience. Still, he refused to relinquish his full humanity in the process. Working as a family doctor, utilizing both science and deep caring, he is not defensive about his mistakes, but rather, honest and remarkably willing to show us his vulnerability.