Becoming a Doctor wil be published Spring 2026. It is the inside story of one person’s transformation from naive student to professorial physician. It will make compelling reading for anyone who, when seeing a doctor, has wondered ‘How did you get to be that way?’ Becoming a Doctor describes what it feels like to be transformed from a naïve student into a professorial physician. This very personal ‘re-membering’ evokes the joys, absurdities and frustrations of medical work. The author observes his younger self’s efforts to regulate feelings and to communicate with patients and colleagues in prescribed ways. The relationships with patients he describes often feel like performances in which the doctor’s self need play little part. Other ways of being a doctor are hard to imagine within a hospital, where patients’ day-to-day concerns are invisible. Doctors in the 1960s, as now, were more focused on disease than on illness or suffering. They avoided thinking about death and were curiously silent about healing, recovery or rehabilitation. Becoming a Doctor shows how difficult it is for a young person to resist the pressures of history and culture. These pressures are described from the inside, along with medicine’s often puzzling pleasures. Key selling points Presents a sometimes affectionate, sometimes scathing inside story of medical education and its effects on students and doctors Raises troubling questions about the mentality and practice of a modern doctor Suggests that medicine’s current limitations, such as its naivety about psychology, have long histories Exposes medicine’s reluctance to reflect on itself and escape its traditional boundaries