Although described as memoir, it quickly becomes clear that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in Terrence Holt's "Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories'' will be murky. On the third page of the introduction, Holt refers to his stories as parables of life in a hospital and the making of doctors (himself in particular); by the fourth, he explains that the patients in the book are not "based upon specific individuals . . . They aren't 'facts.' "
Furthermore, despite having drawn upon his experiences as an internal-medicine resident for the content of the stories, told mostly in the first person, he writes that their narrator evolved "into someone else [who] dealt with patients different from the ones I cared for, and . . . in ways I never did."
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