`BABY DOCTOR' SETS A NEW BENCHMARK IN MEDICAL WRITING

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993                   TAG: 9301030207
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT Staff
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`BABY DOCTOR' SETS A NEW BENCHMARK IN MEDICAL WRITING
BABY DOCTOR. By Perri Klass. Random House. $22.
Perri Klass has written lively accounts of her progress as a medical student and a thoughtful essay on the role of women as physicians. Now, she has turned her pen to the three-year journey spent after medical school on the road to becoming a pediatrician.
Accounts of this passage in a physician's training, while not commonplace, are no longer the novelty that "Intern" by Doctor X was 20 years ago. Even the training of women physicians has made popular publication. No account, however, stands as the benchmark that Klass' personal odyssey does.
Her internship began in the neonatal intensive care unit. Her first patient weighed 3 pounds! An ICU is a difficult place to be by its very nature - difficult for the patients who are sick enough to require more than the usual hospital attention (read that as more invasive devices disrupting the body's integrity), and difficult for the nurses and physicians who work there over long hours with too many patients who don't survive.
Adult patients often forget much of an ICU experience and that is probably the most useful, protective response. But, how difficult it must be for a premature infant, untimely born by six or eight or more weeks and introduced to life in this fashion, uncomforted by a mother's arms.
Klass and her charges survived this passage, and she is surely the better physician for this mature reflection she has written. Mother of a 2-year-old at the start of training and eight months pregnant with her second at the end, she coped with long, sleepless nights, regular separation from spouse and child, the tragedies of childhood deaths and congenital injuries - all the stuff of a pediatrician's training.
We, her readers, are all richer for it.
Her insight is solid, her wit shines through the dark places; her sense of balance and propriety seldom fails; and, when she is uncertain (how often that is so in medicine!), she admits it.
If she practices medicine as well as she writes, her small patients are well-cared for indeed.

Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB