“[A] vivid, warts-and-all memoir . . . [an] always intriguing account of a life well-lived.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A candid picture of a surgeon’s life. . . Cardiothoracic surgeon Smith . . . makes his book debut with a forthright memoir about his roundabout path to medicine and the commitment and accountability inherent in being a physician.”
—Kirkus Reviews
As a surgeon at Columbia University and the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Craig R. Smith has been no stranger to pressure—from performing President Bill Clinton’s quadruple bypass, to openly massaging patients’ hearts. But when the COVID pandemic shut down non-emergency operations at New York City hospitals, Dr. Smith was presented with a different purpose. He began writing daily email updates from the front lines of the pandemic battle. The updates—designed to inform and reassure—became a balm to his colleagues, and when the Wall Street Journal published them in April 2020, they were immediately recognized as essential dispatches from “the pandemic’s most powerful writer.”
Dr. Smith has now written a deeply thoughtful new memoir, NOBILITY IN SMALL THINGS: A Surgeon’s Path (St. Martin’s Press; on-sale October 10, 2023), sharing what goes into the impossible decisions he must make on behalf of his patients. President Bill Clinton has praised it as “much more than a medical memoir; it’s an elegant work of literature.” Diane Sawyer has called it “a book of staggering reach” from a “fearless explorer of what it is to be human when the choices are hard, the stakes high, and courage is the only choice,” while Senator Cory Booker says “[Smith’s] story, his journey, is a compelling narrative of a servant leader who in times of trial emerged as a humble hero.”
Dr. Craig R. Smith’s NOBILITY IN SMALL THINGS considers the moments of a surgeon’s life, both routine and extraordinary. The book introduces patients and peers, and moves from family-building and heartbreak at home, to the tragic suicide of two fellow M.D.s. Dr. Smith also writes with humor and vulnerability about how he overcame a long period of social anxiety early in his career.
In this memoir, Dr. Smith shows readers not just the making of a surgeon, but the maintenance of one: the deep feeling and moral philosophy that anchor the daily miracles that define his profession. Dr. Smith makes clear the stakes involved in being a surgeon make it a higher calling and that calling requires a higher standard of accountability. This deeply felt personal responsibility is a throughline as he takes readers into the operating theater.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
CRAIG R. SMITH, MD has served as the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University and the New York Presbyterian Hospital for fifteen years. In March of 2020, when New York City became the world’s COVID-19 epicenter, Smith started writing daily COVID email updates to his colleagues. The emails went viral, leading The Wall Street Journal to dub Smith “The Pandemic’s Most Powerful Writer.” He lives in New York City with his wife and has three grown daughters.