CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Every doctor has gone through it -- the stamina-testing, information-overload experience that is medical school.

It's a trial by fire for students who up until then have had an easy time with academics but who quickly face physical and intellectual demands so intense they have been known to trigger depression, or worse, in some students.

A new book by author Jacqueline Marino gives an insider's look at what getting through medical school really takes in this case, by creating a portrait of students at Case Western Reserve University Medical School.

"You have to be a brainiac, and hard-working, and even then it's very difficult," says Marino, 39, an assistant professor of journalismat Kent State University. "It's a huge commitment and sacrifice, and I wanted to see what that was like."

So she followed three students at Case's medical school over their four-year sojourn. Marino takes readers through nights of students cramming for daunting bio-chemistry exams, days when they first faced the cadavers they'd dissect, and hours caring for patients -- checking pulses, performing CPR on a dying woman, assisting in a birth.

"White Coats: Three Journeys Through An American Medical School," started as a single magazine story by Marino, then a Cleveland magazine staffer, in 2005. Based on reader reaction to that story, and her own interest in the student's challenges, Marino decided to follow the three students beyond the day they received the short white coats bestowed upon medical students, through theiryears of school and training.

The students she chose -- based on their candor and willingness to open their lives to her examination -- were wildly different in background, and in their views toward medical school:

Mike Norton, a Mormon from Utah whose wife was pregnant during his first year of med school and whose father would face a dire diagnosis;

Marleny Franco, born in the Dominican Republic and motivated to be a doctor by the health care disparities she'd seen that were based on language, race and culture;

Millie Gentry, a statuesque half-Taiwanese young woman, who entered medical school with determination to simultaneously have a balanced life that involved part-time modeling, shopping, cooking and friends outside school.

Read the rest here:

Author Jacqueline Marino details CWRU medical school life in 'White Coats'