Learning How the Heart Beats: The Making of a Pediatrician Book

Claire McCarthy spent her years as a student at Harvard Medical School and as a resident at Children's Hospital working hard during the day to master her chosen profession and writing late into the night in her journal. Writing helped her understand the dramatic changes she was witnessing in herself and the overwhelming events she was participating in at the hospital each day. Now she helps us understand this mysterious professional metamorphosis by sharing with us twenty-three extraordinary tales from this time - tales in which the grueling, humbling, and exhilarating experience of being initiated into the world of medicine becomes personal and unforgettable. With a few deft strokes McCarthy sketches vivid scenes and characters, creating stories that illuminate many aspects of medical training as well as the heartwrenching human dramas that occur every day on a hospital ward. Into this narrative McCarthy weaves her own sensitive insights into the perplexing medical and ethical issues facing us today. She writes with her heart and her head of the difficult choices doctors must make, and of her intense feelings as she watches patients suffer, die, or miraculously recover.

"...the reader witnesses the maturation of a young pediatrician as she attempts to align her own sensitivities within the narrow parameters dictated by an insensitive bureaucracy...the setting is Harvard and Boston's inner city