‘See One, Do One, Teach One’ is Grace Farris’s graphic memoir of med school: NPR

For most people, knowledge of what life is like on the job for healthcare workers comes primarily from two limited vantage points: watching television shows and experiencing their own patient care.

The same is true for many people who eventually become doctors and nurses, as Grace Faris reminds us in her sensitive, energetic graphic memoir, See One, Do One, Teach One: The Art of Becoming a Doctor. “I was completely unprepared before starting medical school,” she writes. But, as he shows in his new book, once a person moves up to become a professional health care worker, he or she faces a whole new set of issues. At that time, it can be difficult to switch from one patient to another – and to remember what it’s like to be the person receiving care.

In 2012, shortly after completing her residency, Faris gave birth to her first child at the Boston hospital where she works. The years in medical school and beyond have already familiarized her with all parts of the birth process, and her deliveries have not involved serious complications—but she still experiences a state of shock afterward. She says: “Becoming a patient made me rethink everything and rethink my medical training. What had just happened?”

Faris, whose biography gives equal importance to his impressive accomplishments as both a doctor and an artist, skillfully guides readers on his long and winding medical school journey. While most people agree that the process takes years and involves various steps, public knowledge about the specifics is often oversimplified, overdramatized, or simply mystified. Farris brings readers behind the scenes to help them develop a better understanding of all aspects of the experience – from anxiety over student loans and frequent bouts of impostor syndrome to friendships formed under stressful circumstances and the impossibility of work-personal life balance. She takes us with her to first-year anatomy class, where things go relatively smoothly until, at the end of the semester, the bone saw is taken out. One of the students goes down, and the professor, without missing a beat, tells the class that this is a “normal reaction.” In another scene, Farris describes how medical students are required to learn over 10,000 new words over the course of a year. In a series of illustrated flashcards depicting these new words and their meanings (“necrosis,” “apoptosis”), we come to realize how complex and overwhelming such an endeavor can seem.

Faris has a knack for breaking down the complexities of the medical school journey and making them accessible and direct, as he includes at the beginning in a full-page diagram titled, “The Path to Becoming a Doctor.” Here, she maps the various distinct stages, from preclinical and clinical years to residency, fellowship, and attendance. She also plays with visual metaphors, to give a sense of the texture of certain emotions and experiences. Working in an emergency room for the first time during your internal medicine clerkship feels like encountering a tsunami, as classroom knowledge and limited clinical experiences are suddenly and forcefully put to the test. And later, when she’s pursuing her medical internship, she suddenly begins to feel less like an impostor, comparing this change to the slow, noticeable change of the seasons. This contemplative occasion is depicted in a pair of bright images, a landscape of sturdy trees studded with golden leaves.

Faris’s illustrations — painted in a loose, minimalist style with a bright, colorful palette — present commonalities that feel relatable to those who have attended med school. They also include specifics from his own personal history. In her early years of medical school, even her clinical years, she didn’t know what type of medicine she wanted to do. We act as witnesses as she begins to recognize the specialties that are definitely not for her (surgery, pediatrics), and those that might be (psychiatry, internal medicine). For Faris, it’s been a slow, anxious and ultimately gratifying journey to figure it all out.

Some of the most fascinating moments in the book occur when Faris realizes how her artistic interests and her medical activities overlap. Farris passes a “turning point” in dissecting the ear and encountering the smallest bone in the human body: “The little steps were a miracle.” Her artistic skills and sensibilities come in handy at various stages of the learning process, such as as a way to help her become better acquainted with human anatomy and even when she finds that it helps her to sketch and diagram the various materials she needs to remember. The title of the book comes from a phrase said by one of her surgical rotation supervisors, “a classic expression in medicine.” The surgeon asks Farris to watch while he stitches the surgical site, so that he can perform this last step of the procedure himself the next time. “After all, how can I teach someone?” Faris is surprised at the last step of the phrase when she watches and then attempts the skill on her own.

See one, do one, teach one A growing body of work has joined what is often referred to as graphic medicine, the community and practice of using comics and illustration to support healthcare workers and patients in efforts to tell stories that speak to all types of experiences. If it’s too easy to forget – or too hard to imagine – what it’s like to be a medical student, health care worker, or even a patient in certain situations, books like Farris’s are an effective learning tool. They offer an important, powerful way to bridge that gap.