Review: "Doctor" by Andrew Bomback

Doctor by Andrew Bomback
Published September 2018 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Bomback's path to medicine was reasonably straightforward: with his own father a doctor, he had a clear sightline to what medicine could be. He went into nephrology, though, not pediatrics, and what he saw was a changing face of medicine—one that would eventually push his father, who was infinitely more comfortable with paper charts and quick, instinct- and experience-based diagnoses than he was with technology and insurance rules, out of practice.

I've read a lot of medical memoirs. I never had any interest in going into medicine myself, but I'll read about it until the cows come home. But...I think this book was a missed opportunity. It's part of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series—short books about common objects (or, in this case, I guess professions). The contents vary: sometimes the books are memoirs, but sometimes they're microhistories or cultural critiques. And there's a bit that is broader here (Bomback talks about where medicine is going—i.e., that everything now involves computers—relative to what it was in his father's heyday, although in 2025, now that the conversation is all about AI, Bomback's take already feels dated), but more than that it's personal story, which is to say memoir. Stories about Bomback's father; stories about Bomback's own patients; ventures into parenting (with a wife who is also a doctor and—Bomback mentions only in passing—both frustrated that she did not go into surgery and aware that balancing surgery and parenting would be difficult); and so on. And all of that's fine!*

But Object Lessons has the chance to do something so unique, and a medical memoir is not all that unique. I would have liked to see what this book was if it had taken the form of...the history of doctors, say. Or a cultural history of nephrology. (Is that a thing? Now we'll never know.) Or something specific to, oh, scalpels, or dialysis, or something like that. Maybe I just don't think that a doctor is a "thing"? Or perhaps I think it could be, but this book isn't exploring any of the questions I hoped it might. Fine if you're in it for anecdotal memoir, but with this series I always hope for something more.

* Well, most of it's fine. The chapter about callous doctor jokes felt unnecessary, and there's a moment when Bomback wonders who would love a blind and fat woman (a patient of his) and I wondered, not for the first time, just what they're teaching in medical school.