Harahan, LA, February 06, 2024 –David Guttman, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, has completed his new book, “Coming Home”: an autobiographical work that follows the author’s remarkable medical career.
Author David Guttman attended Madison High School. After high school, he went to St. Lawrence University for a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, followed by a master’s degree from Cornell University and a PhD from Tulane University. He spent four years in Colombia doing research in entomology and then attended Creighton University, where he got an MD followed by a residency in pediatrics at Albany Medical Center.
From the time David started college until he finished his residency, he spent seventeen years, and his father used to joke that he was the oldest living premed in the country. David became a board-certified pediatrician and practiced pediatrics for more than forty years. He knows he took the long way around, but he wouldn’t change it for anything. David has retired from medicine and now devotes his time to writing. He thanks his mother for teaching him to read when the school said he was hopeless.
David writes, “Two years earlier, I had just finished my residency in pediatrics in Upstate New York and headed south with my wife, our three kids, one dog, and a fifty-thousand-dollar debt. Life was always more exciting than my real life, I did what everyone else did: study the classified ads in specialty medical journals, make phone calls, and attend interviews with promising offers (often the operative word is promising, as opposed to delivering) in what was cynically noted as the ‘howdy-shake circuit’ To consolidate efforts, we had set up two nearby Alabama practice interviews (one in Phoenix City and one in Montgomery) and followed SOP: meet the doctors, tour the office and hospital, get a quick guided tour of the town and practice, and be all sweetness and smiles, followed by a dress-up dinner where you and your prospective partners could size each other up, which meant analyzing what you drank, what football team you loved, and whether your spouse was too obnoxious or good-looking for the other doctors’ wives.”