Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine

In Let Me Heal, prize-winning author Kenneth M. Ludmerer provides the first-ever account of the residency system for training doctors in the United States. He traces its development from its nineteenth-century roots through its present-day struggles to cope with new, bureaucratic work-hour
regulations for house officers and, more important, to preserve excellence in medical training amid a highly commercialized health care system.

Let Me Heal provides a highly engaging, richly contextualized account of the residency system in all its dimensions. It also brilliantly analyzes the mutual relationship between residency education and patient care in America. The book shows that the quality of residency training ultimately
depends on the quality of patient care that residents observe, but that there is much that residency training can do to produce doctors who practice in a better, more affordable fashion.

Let Me Heal is both a stunning work of scholarship and a highly engaging account of how one becomes a doctor in the United States. It is indispensable reading for those who wish to understand what it means to learn and practice medicine and what is needed to make medical education and patient care
in America better. The definitive work on the subject, it is destined to become a classic that will be consulted by readers far into the future.


Author: Kenneth M. Ludmerer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 10/01/2014
Pages: 456
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9780199744541

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2015 pg. 1353
New York Review of Books 06/04/2015 pg. 60

About the Author

Kenneth M. Ludmerer is Professor of Medicine, Professor of History, and the Mabel Dorn Reeder Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.