My New Book, "Making the Cut," is Now Available

The work combines gritty medical memoir with a critique of and prescription for healing our broken healthcare system. I hope you enjoy it!

My latest book is now available from Amazon and other booksellers. (For those who prefer to listen to their books, it will soon be available in audiobook format, and I’ll post a notice here when the audiobook is available).

From shocking scenes in the hospital during my training to lessons about trust, suffering, and what it truly means to truly heal, the book is an unflinching look at modern medicine and contemporary society.

This would make the perfect gift for any family or friends who are in healthcare or are considering a career in the healing professions. Indeed, it is written for anyone who cares about reforming our healthcare system. I believe it’s some of my best writing and I’m very pleased to finally see it in print (I started the manuscript 22 years ago upon completion of medical school!).

Here’s a taste of the narrative, from the opening of Chapter 5:

My job was to hold the leg. Until I was holding just the leg.

The electric saw was buzzing, bits of bone were flying, and a tendril of smoke wafted up from the point where saw met bone. We were performing an amputation.

It was a surprisingly quick operation, no more than half an hour. Above the knee, the resident made a circumferential cut with a scal­pel, tied off the few major leg vessels, and continued cutting until he reached bone. Then it was time to pick up the saw, an instrument that did its work quickly . . . until the leg came off in my hands, floating free from the patient’s body. It was heavier than I expected. I handed it to a nurse, who put it in a plastic bag marked “biohazard” and car­ried it out of the operating room. I wondered what they did with these biohazards.

And some early responses from critics and readers…

“In Making the Cut, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty offers a luminous and unflinchingly candid memoir that traces the inner contours of medical formation with intellectual rigor and moral clarity. Through richly textured narrative and incisive reflection, he illuminates the ethical complexities, existential inquiries, and quiet crucibles that define the making of a physician. This is a rare work—at once literary and philosophical—that not only bears witness to the hidden struggles and redemptive moments of medical training but also reorients the reader toward the telos of good medicine: the integral flourishing of both patient and healer.”

—Keri O. Brenner, MD, MPA, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University

“In the tradition of such medical chronicles as Intern and House of God, Dr. Kheriaty records his progression from medical student to a full-fledged attending physician by reflecting on the patients he cared for, and who taught him in turn. This outsider, not-quite-orthodox medical student evolves into a questioning physician—and questions abound. Both affectionate critique and pointed criticism from a self-professed reluctant romantic in love with flawed patients and his flawed profession, he looks at his profession as he would a patient and determines that it is sick indeed. This book is his prescription for a cure.”

—G. Kevin Donovan, MD, MA, Clinical Professor Emeritus and Director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University

Please pass this along to anyone who might benefit from the book.