Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar, 268 pages.

Jauhar, who chronicled the beginning of his career in his 2008 book, Intern, here recounts what he sees as the decline in the morale and intellectual climate in his profession. Working as a specialist in heart failure at Long Island Jewish hospital, Jauhar finds that, because of all the changes in healthcare and payment plans over the last several years, he and his family cannot quite afford the life they thought they could on a cardiologist's salary. Many of the medical professionals Dr. Jauhar encounters, especially those who had their hearts set on getting wealthy, become burnt out or resort to complicated, and from the patients point of view, unnecessary, schemes to increase the amount earned per patient seen. Jauhar himself tries several different extracurricular workflows that he hopes will keep him afloat without compromising his ethics too much.
While Jauhar himself read the audio of his first book, Patrick McCarthy reads this one, and while he does an adequate job, the change in voice is a bit jarring.
Jauhar is a very good writer, but he tells a sort of  a grim and dispiriting tale.

The Heart Specialist / Claire Rothman 325 pp.

Our Monday Matters reading group enjoyed this, and I did, too, with qualifications. This is a fictional re-telling of the life of Maude Abbot, one of the first female physicians in Canada and certainly its first female cardiac specialist. She overcame tremendous obstacles, scorn, sexism and hostility to carve a place for herself in the medical community of Montreal and the wider world. It's always refreshing to be reminded of what women had to go through to determine their own destinies a mere hundred years ago. Abbot's story is fascinating; my complaint with the novel is that Rothman has given us too blurry a sketch of the woman. Long sections of her life are elided, and Rothman is especially stingy with the details of her work. Still, this was a good, solid piece of historical fiction.