Patient by Patient: Lessons in Love, Loss, Hope, and Healing from a Doctor's Practice

A Seattle doctor recounts the lessons she learned from her patients and her family after launching her own medical practice in this touching memoir.

An intimate portrait of the doctor-patient relationship. Emily Transue offers insightful and engaging reflections on the interplay of health and illness. —Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Incidental Findings , Editor-in-Chief, Bellevue Literary Review

Patient by Patient is the memoir of a young doctor, fresh from residency, as she explores the joys and frustrations of beginning her medical practice. As she strives to help her patients face a range of challenges from the humorous to the profoundly devastating, she learns that while medical school gave her an M.D., treating patients has made her a doctor.

At the same time she is working with her patients, she is also struggling with illness in her own family. Through her shifting perspectives of doctor, daughter, and granddaughter, she contents with the process of dying, the experience of grief, and the buoyancy of the human spirit.

The sources of Transue's knowledge about love, loss, hope, and healing are not medical texts or professors, but the patients she treats and gets to know—those she helps to wellness and those she must let go.

Doctors and patients seeking renewal, inspiration, laughter, and wisdom will find them all in this deftly written book. It is filled with hope and with courage and with joy. —Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University