"[A] fine memoir of Jauhar’s training in a New York City hospital . . . Intern succeeds as an unusually transparent portrait of an imperfect human being trying to do his best at a tough job . . . The story he tells here is antiheroic, full of uncertainty, doubt and frank disgust . . . In addition to telling Jauhar’s own story, Intern delivers a vivid portrait of the culture of a New York City hospital, with its demanding hierarchy and sometimes indifferent cruelty. Evocative street sketches bring relief from the claustrophobic wards while echoing the medical inhumanity inside. Jauhar depicts a city rich in energy and youthful beauty, which manhandles its own citizens once illness renders them foul smelling and inarticulate . . . The medical system ultimately wore down Jauhar’s most idealistic impulses, and yet allowed him to find a certain peace. 'Medicine, I learned, is a good profession, not a perfect one—and there are many ways it could change for the better,' he writes. 'But most of its practitioners . . . were fundamentally good people trying to do good every day.'"—Vincent Lam, The New York Times Book Review

"Brutally frank . . . Rarely has a more conflicted or unpromising candidate entered the field of medicine, and this mismatch gives Intern its offbeat appeal. There are many accounts of American medical training, but none related by a narrator quite so wobbly, introspective, crisis prone and fumbling . . . In a book filled with colorful medical anecdotes, Dr. Jauhar's own case stands out. Half the time it's not clear whether he should be treating others or others should be treating him, which does in fact happen when he develops a herniated disc midway through his training, complicated by a deep depression associated with a rolling existential crisis. The inside look at the workings of the medical internship system is fascinating, but it cannot compete with Dr. Jauhar's own psychological adventure, a quasireligious journey from agnosticism to robust faith, with occasional dips into outright atheism."—William Grimes, The New York Times

"Interns are the overburdened apprentices of the medical profession, and alas, the people they sharpen their skills upon are us. In Jauhar's wise memoir of his two-year ordeal of doubt and sleep deprivation at a New York hospital, he takes readers to the heart of every young physician's hardest test: to become a doctor yet remain a human being."—Time

"Intern is an excellent, well-written book in which Sandeep Janhar describes his first 2 years of internship and residency in internal medicine at New York hospital (now New York-Presbyterian Hospital), a prestigious academic medical center in New York City. On one level, the book may be viewed simply as a memoir of one person's journey through the challenging and demanding apprenticeship that is necessary to complete training. Janhar describes his own unique journey from graduate work in physics to medical school, his ambivalence about his decision, and his struggles with his family during this process. But the majority portion of the book is devoted to a compelling description of the difficult and formative years of his internship and residency. For those of us long past residency training, Janhar captures vividly the uncertainty, fear, and extreme exhaustion that dominates the experience for most . . . Intern is more than simple a reminiscence of a difficult time, however. As Janhar describes his experiences, he provides a window into the world of the resident that can give us important insights into the difficulties of this training and the ways in which it can be unsafe and dehumanizing. Much of what Janhar describes is the inevitable product of assuming an enormous amount of responsibility at a time of relative inexperience and youth. The hours are long, and the work is grueling. He recounts the harrowing experience of being a night float at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he is responsible for dozens of severely ill patient