Surgeons Do Not Cry On Becoming a Doctor in the Philippines

Surgeons Do Not Cry is a memoir in thirty-seven short essays by Ting Tiongco, M.D., looking back on his years in the 1970s as a medical student at the University of the Philippines and an intern and resident at the Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH). Written across the haze of forty years and gilded by deep affection for the institution that shaped him, the stories recount his ten-year development as a doctor and surgeon.

By turns funny, tender, and unflinching, Tiongco's essays capture the exhaustion and camaraderie of medical training — and use the charity wards of PGH as a lens on the sharp class stratification of Philippine society, where a patient's fate can turn on what they can afford. A vivid, humane portrait of becoming a doctor in the Philippines.