Family medicine had seemed like the logical specialty for me, even while I was still in Albuquerque. Cardiology had captured my attention early on; the oncology classes were interesting; I liked obstetrics and, although I wasn’t fascinated, I could put up with orthopedics. And it seemed obvious that I wasn’t meant to sub-specialize; a career spent solely with lungs or brains or bowels sounded gruesome; radiology was just for the ardent capitalists among us, anesthesiology for the social misfits, surgery for the egomaniacs who would save the world with their scalpels.

By the time I entered the medical world, the general practice of the first half of the twentieth century had become “family practice”—a Jill-of-all-trades jumble of obstetrics and gynecology, internal medicine, pediatrics, and orthopedics, plus a lot more day-to-day dermatology than I ever would have wanted—and somehow it seemed to suit me. I enjoyed working with women—with apprehensive teenagers who wanted to believe they were ready to go on the pill but who knew in their hearts that they were still children, with expectant mothers who were so wonderfully healthy and hopeful, with new mothers now overwhelmed by the work and the worry, and I was often struck by women for whom menopause was a disquieting reminder of their mortality despite the fact that most of them would live for forty more years.

The first time I delivered a baby entirely on my own—it was early in my residency in Denver and he was a black-eyed boy whose young mother gave him the name Socorro, I still remember—I was giddy with satisfaction, delighted that all had gone well, that I hadn’t done something stupid, and aware in a way I hadn’t been before that this sole arena of medicine in which your patients aren’t necessarily sick or suffering was one I was fortunate to be a part of.

The medical folklore had it that the reason residencies were so demanding, so exhausting, so stripped of sleep and any sort of social life, was that the doctors who ran the programs had been slave labor once themselves and now were determined to exact similar suffering on their protégés. As far I could tell, it was folklore founded in fact. Following a full day in the well-baby clinic at Denver General, or seeing adult patients at one of the hospital’s neighborhood health centers, I could count on—depending on my rotation—a wild night’s work in the trauma center, a couple of hours of sleep on a cot in obstetrics during a protracted labor, no sleep at all when the babies were popping out as if we were having a party, none as well when I had to scrub and assist on a C-section. Two nights a week I was off—gloriously alone and undemanded—my phone disconnected, my bathtub filled for a change, my flannel nightgown pressed into service, then sleeping the sleep of the dead for eight hours before the cruel morning came and it was time to go back to work.

I survived my residency, as virtually everyone does, by acknowledging that I was learning an amazing amount, that I finally was beginning to feel like a doctor—increasingly confident of my skills and critical perceptions—and by reminding myself that, in the long run, I was going to be rewarded with money. Doctors who tell you they never consider the financial end of the profession are lying through their teeth—not that everyone who becomes a plastic surgeon or a pediatrician, a pathologist or a family practitioner, for that matter, does so solely to build her investment portfolio, but the frank fact is that after seemingly endless years of study and apprenticeship, of sacrifice and sleep deprivation, of making less than the minimum wage while you cover for staff physicians taking the afternoon off for golf, you become convinced that, when your turn finally comes, you damn well deserve some dollars.

During the first year of my family practice residency—before I encountered one Harry MacLeish and my life made a different turn—I was so unattached as to consider the eventual likelihood of mating and marriage pretty improbable. I was going solo, it appeared, and it would be up to me alone to pay off my education loans and join a practice somewhere and find a house and finally replace my battered Honda and maybe even buy a dress for those occasions when I simply had to wear one. I wanted to practice medicine—good medicine, and by now my aspiration had become a real commitment—but oh, I was eager to escape that imposed professional poverty, and, after thirty years, at last to be on my own.

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Excerpted from The Sorrow of Archaeology by Russell Martin, Copyright© 2005 by Russell Martin. Excerpted by permission of the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.