Nobility in Small Things: A Surgeon’s Path

Columbia University surgeon Smith, whose daily email updates about Covid-19 went viral in 2020, debuts with a vivid, warts-and-all memoir. After college in the 1970s, Smith was aimless, halfheartedly entering and then leaving a graduate biology program at Dartmouth before finding work as a telephone lineman. Eventually, and despite submitting a bizarre personal statement about organ-playing, Smith was accepted to medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, which set him on a long path to becoming the chair of Columbia’s surgery department. Smith documents his early struggles with winning self-deprecation (“My ignorance of botany was exceeded only by my indifference,” he writes of being tapped to lead a botany lab at Dartmouth) that carries through to his descriptions of medical school, his early career successes, and eventually, his much-publicized 2004 open-heart surgery on former president Bill Clinton. Sections on Covid are graver, but never melodramatic, as Smith catalogs the devastation caused by federal mismanagement in the early months of the pandemic. He opens up about his personal life, too, discussing his lifelong panic attacks and recounting the still-unexplained death of his two-month-old daughter, Lydia, in 1983. It amounts to an occasionally humorous and always intriguing account of a life well-lived. (Oct.)