Book excerpt: In highly personal pieces that are both memoirs of the author's own imperfect experiences as a young doctor and "letters" ostensibly addressed to medical hopefuls, he brings to light both the brutality and beauty of the profession in which saving and losing lives is all in a day's work. A surgeon, he shows, must be at once infallible and infallibly human- a mortal miracle worker whose task is to overwhelm and control the body, but "kindly and gravely, and without condescension."--Publishers description.