In personal, often poignant detail – in stories that are sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes revealing, and always gripping – Dr. Clifton K. Meador tells of his days as a medical student between 1951 and 1955.

His story is all the more meaningful because of the medical school he attended and the era in which he attended. His school was the prestigious Vanderbilt School of Medicine. The post-World War II era in which he was a medical student would mark the beginning of the biggest explosion in medical knowledge in the 20th century. As such, Clifton Meador’s journey through medical school also serves as a striking look at American medicine at a crossroads – the medical legacy of yesterday coupled with the medical promise of tomorrow.

He tells his story through the four ingredients that are the recipe of a medical student’s life – his professors, his classmates, his patients, and a candid look inside himself (his emotions, his changes) as he is molded into a physician.

His professors include those who were writing the textbooks and uncovering the new scientific knowledge. “Jungle Jim”, the anatomy professor. The “Madman”, a genius on a Harley-Davidson. “The Chinaman”, who later would gain national renown for his work in nutrition. The author of a key text on physical examination. And “The Great Hartmandini”, who used a dramatic and bloody “magic show” to demonstrate how to calculate blood loss.

His fellow classmates included those who went on to become stars – a future chairman of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, a distinguished general surgeon in Kentucky, a leading urologist in south Florida. In medical school, these classmates, like young Clifton, had to learn, had to make their mistakes, and at times had to take time out to play. The author writes, for example, of classmate Hank, who went on to become a great surgeon but whose first arm cast fell off his young-boy patient before the child could get from the emergency room to the inside of his home. He writes, too, of classmate Oscar, a high achiever with an inquiring mind, who from time to time took great relish in being a prankster. It was Oscar who, during medical school, joined Clifton in a night-time “Silver Phantom” practical joke of spray-painting their boarding house. It also was Oscar who, in his career as a Vanderbilt professor of medicine, received international awards for uncovering new scientific knowledge. Clifton’s classmate and fellow prankster Oscar became the leader of national clinical trials that proved control of blood sugar delayed the vascular complications of diabetes mellitus.

The patients student Clifton encountered in medical school were, as he describes them, his “teachers.” He learned from the two elderly husband-and-wife missionaries, both victims of advanced syphilis (apparently the result of the husband’s one-time sexual encounter with a native girl at one of their missionary stops in Africa). He learned from an uneducated hill woman whom Clifton and a classmate interviewed at length before they took time to really listen. Finally they asked her, “How much water do you drink?” She replied, “Oh, ‘bout three gallons a day.” The diagnosis: Diabetes insipidus. The lesson Clifton was taught by his professors: Listen to the patient. Most of the time if you just listen, the patient will tell you what’s wrong.

As for himself and his progress down the road of training to become a physician, Clifton Meador tells a moving story of his love affair with medicine and how that love affair was born. It’s the story of how he almost died at age 5 from lobar pneumonia and soon knew he wanted to be a doctor. Once he made his decision, he never looked back. “When I finally got there, I loved medical school. I had waited for it for nearly 15 years, and it was a magical experience. I found the study of the human body completely absorbing.”

Like Clifton Meador’s view of his incredible experience attending medical school, the experience of reading his book is both magical and completely absorbing.

Med School beautifully evokes a colorful era in medical training at one of the country’s premiere institutions, a time when clinical giants personally molded and shaped the characters of the budding doctors in their charge. Dr. Meador’s wonderful, intimate voice and style - full of humor and insight – make us nostalgic for a kind of medical training that was at once harsher, less forgiving, and yet somehow more personable and more meaningful. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was sorry to come to the last page so soon.