Medical

The surgeon had no prestigious named professorship, no N.I.H. grant and no plum administrative position in the hospital’s hierarchy. But to the other surgeons-in-training and me, he was exactly who

One night early in my internship, I received a frantic page for help from a fellow intern. Seasoned nurses had been unable to draw a patient’s blood, which senior doctors

The elderly man lived alone in an apartment complex not far from the hospital. A younger neighbor, who’d watched him hobble down the building’s stairwell for nearly a week, insisted

Not long ago, I heard a respected senior colleague recount to a group of medical students and trainees the story of a patient who had died under his care some

“He’s back?” my colleague asked, eyes widening as she passed the patient’s room. “He’s in the hospital again?” Slender, pale and in his late 60s, the man had first been

Birdlike and in his 80s, the patient had come to the hospital complaining of a new cough. But it was not he whom my colleagues and I found most disquieting.