My apologies for contributing months late. I haven't been around the forums much lately. Also: Everyone listed nonfiction books, whereas I'm citing a novel. So this may be a digression from the OP's intent. Despite that, I post this because this book is one of the best works on the medical field that I've read:
Arrowsmith. By Sinclair Lewis.
Why this book? Because it did the best job of anything I've read to communicate:
- The basic tension between idealism in pursuit of a scientific career vs. demands of career advancement, human desire for societal station, etc. And related: The push-pull of self-centered and occasionally outright selfish desires vs. dedication and intellectual honesty.
- The rush and stumbles of the fields of medicine (including academic research, public health service, and patient care) from poorly empirical practices to more rational, evidence based, scientifically influenced professionalism.
- The existence of medical quackery and outright fraud that nonetheless sports populist appeal, and coexistence with it as a science and medical professional.
Arrowsmith follows a man's travels through his medical education, his stint as a private practitioner, his work as a government health official, and other stops in various research, hospital, and other facilities. Along the way, the book well portrays the protagonist going from idealism to purity to commercialism to service and back again... yet not quite really back to the start, but rather back to idealism, and purity, and commercialism, and so on, but with a more experienced and weathered wisdom. All the while, you don't forget that this is a book about a medical practitioner; the medical science, professional practice, and academic and commercial medical research is never out of sight. Neither are the tensions, triumphs, setbacks, and experiences of each of the careers he samples.
Admittedly, it's not a perfect book. Lewis's satirical bent too often results in characters who are less fully rounded people and more unidimensional epitomies of bad conduct or other negativities which he clearly believes the reader should rail against. And it's possible to view the protagonist less as a person being pulled between idealism and personal desires and more as an inconsistently drawn character whose faults are not organic but more the result of an author who can't make up his mind. Furthermore, the book can feel miserably bleak at times.
But that is
literary criticism. Through the collaboration with bacteriologist Paul de Kruif, the actual
science in the book feels real, as does the journey of the student towards the professional with stops, pauses, and ponderings between all the various directions a then student of medical science could take. The novel has often been used in history of medicine courses - and indeed, as some doctors have testified, in medical programs - to help students get a feel for what the professional practice of medicine is like. As author and medical doctor Howard Markel
had noted in 2001:
"My battered paperback copy of Arrowsmith is annotated throughout with the same pen-scrawled comment: “Still true!” I am hardly alone: from its publication to the present, countless men and women have been inspired to pursue careers in research because of (the protagonist's) intense devotion to science."
This book often has a place in any history of western medicine course. And for good reason. This is why I note it in this thread: It's one of the best "Field of Medicine" books I've read, fiction or not.
Further reading:
Alluding, obviously. 
