Perri Klass' Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor is a series of letters written to her son,
who is about to enter medical school. The author writes as a practicing pediatrician to a soon-to-be colleague and also as a mother to a son with words of advice about the challenging and transformative journey he is about to undertake.
Klass has written other collections of essays on medicine and medical training (A Not Entirely Benign Procedure:
Four Years as a Medical Student and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician's Training) using the same narrative style. In a personal and deeply honest manner, the author unflinchingly shares her own stories, allowing the reader to see her moments of grief and disappointment in the limitations of the medical education process and in the way that medicine is practiced. She writes of the joy and satisfaction when it all comes together; when physicians or physicians-to-be experience the deeply satisfying and life-changing moments that a career spent in medicine can offer.