Dr. Percival favors smoked trout, but he feeds his patients red herrings. Percival is a bit of a stock villain, but even stock villains have the feel of the real in Greene’s novels. Percival inverts the therapeutic alliance, giving the truth to the novel’s warning: “he who forms a tie is lost.”

Knowledge. Experience. Responsibility. Sinclair, a physician turned anthropologist, charts their reinforcement as the NHS makes students into doctors capable of being “On Take” with their “bleep.” Medical training gives you an education and a license. To get both, you have to learn how to “pathologize the world.”

Dialectical thinking depends upon close attention to details; so does doctoring. “If life were not so urgent I would be willing to spend a year talking to a great batsman, asking him questions and probing into all sorts of aspects of his life on and off the cricket field. If he and hit it off…

Shelley’s plague novel includes what could be a physician’s oath: “I am now going to undertake an office fitted for me. I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men’s vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease….”

Few of my books are tear-stained. This one is. I never met Brian Doyle, but I know him. Read this so you will too. Doyle exhibits the curiosity and wonder of the great physician, but with a paternal humor. “Remember–otters. Otters rule. And so: amen.”

Q: “Where were the saints to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” A: Dorothy Day.

Reread Ovid during Covid. The sprawling poem of change ends with Aesculapius leaving his shrine to set up shop in the city. When the serpent-son resumes “his heavenly form, he brought the plague to an end and answered the prayers of the city for healing.” Someone should name a vaccine after him.

My favorite read of the HMS med school memoirs because Thomas is the kind of narrator who charms through self-deprecation. He faults his memory, laments his intelligence, praises the nurses, encourages male silence, and fondly remembers needing to donate blood to make money during residency. “MA law in 1937 stipulated that a blood donor was…

Patients often confuse psych hospitals and prisons. Better than anyone else writing today, Montross shows that this is no delusion, but by design. Montross is a psychiatrist and poet who entered correctional spaces on a therapeutic and humane endeavor: to tell untold stories. Very necessary.

Blue pill masquerading as red pill. There is something here, but it is obscured by reductive arguments and sensational claims. That is how a bestseller works, right? (It is the kind of book where the author publishes a picture of his library card to prove he did the research.) What worried me about this page-turner…