Review: An interesting collection of essays
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 29, 2012
"A Taste of My Own Medicine" is a collection of ten essays by medical school student Maureen Miller. Her essays covered a wide range of topics, but all related in some way to her background or her medical training. Ms. Miller, in the first essay, says, "Here I write as another confused moll in the maw, not too sure where my career is going." That set the tone for the colorful, rich language she uses (I used my Kindle's built-in dictionary a number of times). Now I've known doctors who had a hard time writing a comprehensible paragraph, much less an essay, but soon-to-be-a-doctor Maureen Miller shows her background as a liberal arts graduate who went on to medical school through an atypical route. She writes very well.These are not conventional essays. I sometimes felt like I was tapping into the author's stream of consciousness, as wide-ranging as the essays were. Some appealed to me more than others. One of the essays, titled "Mixing Up the Medicine," was all about rap music and Ms. Miller's website "Rap Genius." Hardly anything in my music collection is less than twenty-five years old, so the essay went right over my head! Other essays, especially the memoir-ish ones, were much more to my liking.It was interesting reading Ms. Miller's ideas about current medical education and the practice of medicine in the U.S. And she has her opinions about health insurance, one of the burning issues of the day and a real political hot potato. All-in-all, "A Taste of My Own Medicine" is an interesting, well written collection of essays. I'm a little too old to have understood many of the references to people, books, and music, but others who are more in tune with the contemporary scene would relate to these references.