Gentle Vengeance: An Account of the First Year at Harvard Medical School

by Charles LeBaron

LeBaron, who entered the Harvard Medical School at the age of thirty-four, chronicles his attempts to challenge the medical establishment and to encourage the world's leading training ground for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399901124
• ISBN13: 9780399901126
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Richard Marek Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A jewel

This is a jewel of a book. One of the best I've read. One of the most memorable and influential. This quote in particular really resonates, "It seemed to me I had a little vial of sweetness and kindness around stomach level. It'd been full when I was born....but I was hanging on for dear life ot those remaining couple ounces. They had me for six or so more years, ample chance to make me spill the rest in wrath or discouragement." The rigor and politics of medicine really can get you down, so I am told. This can happen anywhere, from Harvard to Stanford to Small Town USA to Canada or anywhere else in the world. The sweetness and humanity, is something that ought to endure in this humanistic field, and it is gratifying whenever this is witnessed. LeBaron is such a good writer that I am sad I cannot find any recent writing by him, other than the papers in the medical literature about childhood immunizations. I understand he works for the Center of Disease and Prevention. I am curious to know how his views on medicine and life have changed over the years.

Prognosis: Excellent!

After returning this book to the library, I headed straight to a bookstore to order my own copy, which 25 years later I still own. Author Charles LeBaron applied as a mature student to two med schools, one of which was Harvard. Acceptance from both presents him with an enviable dilemma, and everyone he asks advises him to choose Harvard. Well, nearly everyone; the sole dissenter is a Harvard alumnus. Harvard is mired in its own tautological mystique; Harvard educated doctors are considered the best for no other reason than because they ARE from Harvard. Consequently the institution is content to rest on its laurels, preserve the status quo and do a lot more to preserve this reputation than to deserve it. Unlike most of his classmates, LeBaron has not spent his entire life in a lab and so can afford a luxurious sense of wonder about the human body, evolution, bacteria, and the possibility of a Higher Power. He also very soon finds himself at odds with the very philosophy of this particular school; on the very first day he allies with a couple of classmates in circulating a petition to reschedule Saturday classes... little realizing just how cherished a tradition of Harvard this is. LeBaron has worked at the Lower Manhattan Rehab by day while cramming science courses by night as preparation for med school. His experiences in the trenches of the medical profession and as the child of terminally ill parents give him a rare perspective on the fallibility of doctors. Only too familiar with their callous and distant side, he is determined not to allow the system to warp him. A man of rare compassion, he draws inspiration from several former clients, and these flashbacks provide some of the most moving material in the book. And yet for all this insight, the author occasionally displays a stunning naivete. Feeling overwhelmed at one point, he asks his instructor where he would be better off concentrating his dwindling study time, and is told that only muscles and nerves will be on the final, none of the bones or blood vessels. (Hook, line and sinker!) Somehow the author makes time to record his impressions of the first year of Harvard Medical School, and like all such memoirs, it includes often hilarious glimpses of student life: pressure cooker weeks relieved by drunken costume parties... the giddy, chaotic faculty-student Christmas party... in the middle of the night as everybody is cramming for finals, a power failure suddenly hits. His instructors and fellow students are so deftly drawn with such well-chosen and amusing details, you're left wondering if you could have met them in some of your own classes. The book is occasionally relieved, or interrupted, depending on your point of view, by philosophical short essays. The subject matter can range from the evolution of life on earth to an outraged private rant at God for allowing horrible diseases to afflict people who couldn't possibly deserve such agony. One can easily skip over these pa

Do you *really* wanna go to this med school?

Where they get 6000 of the hopeful vying for 150 places. Where none of the courses are taught by physicians. Where you are presumed to have mastered biochemistry, bacteriology, virology and genetics *before* you arrive. Oh, you'll be a great doctor, all right, but this is because you were *always* gonna be a great doctor. Harvard seems incidental. You might as well pick a more meat-and-potatoes kinda med school. Trouble is, if you go to Harvard you'll end up getting the pick of the residencies. But then, you were gonna be this great doctor anyway, so you'd get the pick of the residencies anyway.