Becoming a Doctor

Name: Becoming a Doctor
Price: 209.92 AUD
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ISBN: 9781839997051

Re-Membering a Medical Education

Christopher D Ward

$261.95 $209.92

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

First Hill Books
12 May 2026

Memoirs; Higher & further education, tertiary education; Medical profession

This book is a very personal account of a medical education that began in 1966. It describes one person's experience of being gradually transformed from a nervous student into a professorial physician.

A doctor's education looks at first sight like a straightforward technical training, but 're-membering' it as a personal experience creates a new and disturbing picture, a blend of joys, absurdities and frustrations. The author observes his younger self's efforts to communicate and to regulate feelings in the prescribed way, and begins to see that to become a doctor is to be at the mercy of almost irresistible pressures. He picks up habits by mimicking the teachers, with sometimes disastrous results.

Communication, and even empathy, are made to seem like performances in which the doctor's self need play no part. Any other way of being a doctor is unimaginable. Hospital medicine figures in the book as a universe that is loveable and yet tragically unable to engage with its patients' ordinary lives. Doctors in the 1960s, as now, were focused on disease and had little to say about illness and suffering, let alone death. They were, and still are, curiously silent about healing, recovery and rehabilitation.

By: Christopher D Ward
Imprint: First Hill Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781839997051
ISBN 10: 1839997052
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 12 May 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Chris Ward is Emeritus Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine and Family Therapist. Author of Between Sickness and Health. The Landscape of Illness and Wellness, Routledge 2020.