Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

If you’re going to get sick, it’s best not to do it on the first Wednesday of August. That’s exactly the day when newly minted graduates of medical universities start their first jobs and are faced with the challenge of applying in practice what they dedicated the last 6 years of training to.

In the first part of Max Pemberton’s trilogy, the intern’s impressions of their first year working in the National Health Service of the United Kingdom are described with tenderness and humor. The young doctor’s maximalism turns into frank bewilderment at realizing how little of his work is actually “saving lives” and how much time is spent filling out forms and thinking through important problems that were discussed nowhere before. For example, how to answer a relative’s question about whether their loved one survived?

At the same time, Max and his young colleagues together search for answers to difficult questions about life, love, mental health—and about how to find time for laundry.

In this book, Max Pemberton gives the reader a chance to peek behind a door into a world where an ordinary person without medical training is not allowed.

Max Pemberton is a doctor who writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph and Reader’s Digest.