Download or read book Letters to a Young Doctor written by Richard Selzer and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1996 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In highly personal pieces that are both memoirs of the author's own imperfect experiences as a young doctor and "letters" ostensibly addressed to medical hopefuls, he brings to light both the brutality and beauty of the profession in which saving and losing lives is all in a day's work. A surgeon, he shows, must be at once infallible and infallibly human- a mortal miracle worker whose task is to overwhelm and control the body, but "kindly and gravely, and without condescension."--Publishers description.