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

The same is true even for many people who eventually become doctors and nurses, as Grace Farris reminds us at the beginning of her sensitive and energetic graphic memoir: See one, do one, teach one: The art of becoming a doctor. “Before I started medical school,” she writes, “I was completely unprepared.” But, as she shows in her new book, once someone transitions to becoming a professional healthcare worker, a whole new set of problems presents themselves. At that point, it can be difficult to move from patient to patient and even remember what it was like to be the person receiving care.

Of See One, Do One, Teach One: The Art of Becoming a Doctor: A Graphic Memoir by Grace Farris MD

WW Norton & Company

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WW Norton & Company

In 2012, shortly after Farris completed her residency, she gave birth to her first child at a Boston hospital where she works. Her years in medical school and beyond have already familiarized her with all parts of the birth process, and her birth does not involve serious complications, but she still experiences a state of shock afterwards. She observes: “Becoming a patient made me want to rethink everything and reconsider my medical training. What had just happened?”

Farris, whose biography gives equal weight to her impressive accomplishments as a physician and an artist, deftly guides readers on her long, winding journey to medical school. While most people recognize that this process takes years and involves several stages, public knowledge of specific details is often oversimplified, overdramatized, or simply left a mystery. Farris takes readers behind the scenes to help them develop a better understanding of all aspects of the experience, from student loan anxiety and persistent bouts of imposter syndrome to friendships forged under stressful circumstances and the inability to achieve work-life balance. She takes us with her to her freshman anatomy class, where everything goes relatively well until, at the end of the semester, they bring out the bone saw. One of the students falls and the teacher, without missing a beat, tells the class that this is a “typical reaction.” In another scene, Farris describes how medical students end up needing to learn more than 10,000 new words over the course of a year. In a series of illustrated cards depicting some of these new words and their meanings (“Necrosis,” “Apoptosis”), we get a sense of how intricate and overwhelming such an endeavor might seem.

Of See One, Do One, Teach One: The Art of Becoming a Doctor: A Graphic Memoir by Grace Farris MD

WW Norton & Company

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WW Norton & Company

Farris has a knack for breaking down the complexities of the journey to medical school to make them accessible and direct, as in a full-page diagram he includes from the beginning, titled “The Path to Becoming a Doctor.” Here, she maps out the various typical stages, from the preclinical and clinical years to residency, fellowship, and fellowship. He also plays with visual metaphors throughout to give insight into the texture of certain feelings and experiences. Working in the emergency room for the first time during your internal medicine internship feels like encountering a tsunami, as classroom knowledge and limited clinical experiences are suddenly and forcefully tested. And later, when she is doing her medical internship, she suddenly begins to feel less of an imposter, comparing the change to the slow, observable transformation of the seasons. This reflective occasion is illustrated in a pair of brilliant images, a landscape of robust trees dotted with golden leaves.