One Breath Apart: Facing Dissection
Here is the brilliance of this book: we readers can see, can feel, can be assured of these proto-doctors great and now not wordless awe inspired by our human frame. We know, now, that these future doctors kneel in prayer in front of the body, our bodies, to whose health they commit their lives. Let no one fear, when faced with an indifferent or cold doctor, that there never beat a warm human heart in that chest. The heart beat, and it beat in resonance with or even for the now still heart of his or her anatomy cadaver. If only we can keep alive that warmth and awe, our medicine will be transformed. This is what this book will do. --Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director, Program in Narrative Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia UniversityOne is never the same after Gross Anatomy class. Sandra Bertman s One Breath Apart is a collective diary of the medical profession s time-honored right-of-passage and a tribute to one of the sacred privileges accorded physicians-in-training. This delightful book is at turns poignant, profound, earnest, and awkward, just like the first year medical students, who are its subjects and contributing authors. --Ira Byock, Professor, Dartmouth Medical School, Author Dying Well and The Four Things That Matter MostPerhaps by serendipity, I obtained a copy of the book at my medical school, the Medical College of Wisconsin. Just a tremendous book. I wish I had it during my medical school years, 1967-1971. --H. Steven Moffic, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Medical College of Wisconsin