Harvard Med: The Story Behind America's Premier Medical School and the Making of America's Doctors.

• Author: Barrett, Paul M.

John Langone has spent much time at Harvard's temple of medical education and returns with a notebook full of impressions of how the high priests of the healing profession are trained. We are right there among the cadavers as students learn anatomy and hone the black humor that shields against their revulsion over slicing body parts. Langone also takes us to the hospital bedsides as would--be doctors stumble through their first patient interviews and later as they struggle to tell people they are dying of cancer. These are pgwerful, well-drawn scenes.

But Langone, a veteran medical journalist, hopes to do more. He aims to illuminate the causes and possible cures of "the gap between caregivers and patients, a gap that is ever-widening because of the intrusion of technology and market forces in medicine." A worthy goal. Unfortunately, Harvard Med reads mostly like a reporter's notebook: It is full of mini-profiles and anecdotes, but lacks the sort of narrative that could show the reader how an institution like Harvard shapes students.

We should care about medical education because it affects the quality of the treatment we get. Langone reiterates the common lament that this treatment has grown increasingly impersonal and expensive as the medical profession has splintered into specialties and subspecialties. He mourns the passing of the old-fashioned family doc, who mixed preventive counseling with compassionate attention to his patients' emotional, as well as physical, health.

In fact, the problems with doctors today have their roots in pre-medical education, and Langone gives this subject insufficient attention. Colleges and medical schools collaborate to shrink the pool of applicants by means of killer science courses like organic chemistry. Naturally, doctors need to know a lot of science, but Harvard Med and other schools place too great an emphasis on applicants' grades in certain undergraduate classes. The supercompetitive science geeks are experts at acing written exams, but don't necessarily...