Overview: Adventures of an American Medical Student by author James Champion is a gritty, fictionalized memoir that explores a range of human suffering with heart, soul, and humor.

Verdict: James Banks is a medical student in Brighton, a rural town in Kentucky’s Appalachia, a region stricken with poverty and an opioid epidemic. James just wants to match with a good psychiatry residency and graduate.

But he has just received a rejection from a residency he applied to, and he has a bad feeling that he failed a medical licensing exam. Failure is not an option. James must become a doctor to pay off $230,000 in student loans.

James runs a gauntlet of clinical rotations in different specialties: family medicine, osteopathic medicine, general surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, emergency medicine, cardiology, neurology, and neurosurgery.

He encounters a motley cast of patients and doctors - including a patient with blue skin and a hostile, tantrum-throwing ob-gyn - who teach him how to become a physician. He sees the best and worst in humanity and even patients who have glimpsed heaven and hell.

Ergo, Adventures of an American Medical Student is a gritty, fictionalized memoir that explores a range of human suffering with heart, soul, and humor.

Chronicling James Banks’ third and fourth years of medical school- the clinical years where he does monthly rotations with different specialties - some might indeed call this a novel, but I would categorize it as a fictionalized memoir, as Dr. Champion makes sure to note at the beginning that some names (but not all) have been changed.

While the passages about the patients he sees were indeed colorfully interesting, it was a shame that every woman he met was described as either attractive, cute, or obese and the men were described as either handsome or overweight, but hey-ho, that is just my own thoughts on that small portion of what is, and genuinely, a very pleasing prose to read.

In short, Champion narrates his physician’s journey throughout his residency in some fine style here, with medical cases getting brought forth (some in great detail) along with casual observations about his chosen path taken.

Indeed, most of the detail is about patients seen and medical cases, which is rather interesting and highly educational. Interestingly, each chapter has footnotes and definitions of what was discussed so the reader can learn about medications and conditions.

About the Author - James Champion is a psychiatrist practicing in Appalachia. He supervises psychiatry residents, teaches medical students, and collaborates with nurse practitioners. He has a D.O. degree from an Appalachian medical school. He lives in Tennessee, US. This is his first book.

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