Excerpt from THE LAWS OF MEDICINE: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science, by Siddhartha

Mukherjee

I n the winter of 2000, during the first year of my medical residency, I lived in a one-room apartment
facing a park, a few steps from the train station at Harvard Square.
Lived is a euphemism. I was on call every third night at the hospital—awake the whole night,
admitting patients to the medical wards, writing notes, performing procedures, or caring for the acutely ill
in intensive care units. The next day—postcall— was usually spent in a dull haze on my futon, catching
up on lost sleep. The third day we named flex, for “flexible.” Rounds were usually done by six in the
evening—and the four or five hours of heady wakefulness that remained were among the most precious
and private of all my possessions. I ran a three-mile circuit around the frozen Charles River as if my life
depended on it, made coffee on a sputtering Keurig, and stared vacantly at the snowdrifts through my
window, ruminating on the cases that I had seen that week. By the end of the first six months, I had
witnessed more than a dozen deaths, including that of a young man, no older than I, who died of organ
failure while awaiting a heart transplant.
....

I spoke to no one, or, at least, I have no memory of speaking to anyone (I ran through a park by night, and
through friends by day). “Illness reminds you that spontaneity, too, is a human right,” a patient once told
me. Part of the horror of hospitals is that everything happens on time: medicines arrive on schedule; the
sheets are changed on schedule; the doctors round at set times; even urine is collected in a graduated
pouch on a timer. Those who tend the ill also experience some of this erasure of spontaneity. Looking
back, I realize that I lived for a year, perhaps two, like a clockwork human, moving from one subroutine
to the next. Days folded into identical days, all set to the same rhythm. By the end of my first month, even
“flex” had turned into reflex.
The only way to break the deadly monotony was to read. In the medieval story, a prisoner is sent
to jail with just one book, but discovers a cosmos of a thousand books in that single volume. In my
recollection, I also read only one book that year—a slim paperback collection of essays titled The
Youngest Science—but I read it as if it were a thousand books. It became one of the most profound
influences on my life in medicine.

From THE LAWS OF MEDICINE: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Copyright © 2015 by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Excerpted with permission by Simon & Schuster, a Division
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.