About this Book

Sayantani DasGupta entered Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with a vision of saving lives and making the world a better place. She was thrilled at the prospect of working in a dynamic and open environment -- but she was in for a rude awakening. Like the military, she faced a strictly hierarchical, female-unfriendly, isolating experience, and wrote this book to survive her schooling. In this book she writes about the nature of medical training, concentrating on the basic science years, clinical experiences, and gender issues in medicine. Her writing spans a wide range of topics, including clinical rotations, romance in the hospital, AIDS, mentoring, and media portrayals of medical professionals. Though discouraged by what she found in medical school, she comes away from the experience with renewed determination to demystify the age-old traditions of medical training in order to create a new environment -- one that helps both physicians and patients.