(Pearson, Rachel) Rachel Pearson, MD PhD, is a resident physician who also holds a PhD from the Institute for the Medical Humanities. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, the Guardian, and the Texas Observer. No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine (W. W. Norton & Company), is a brutally frank memoir about doctors and patients in a health care system that puts the poor at risk. In medical charts, the term “N.A.D.” (No Apparent Distress) is used for patients who appear stable. The phrase also aptly describes America’s medical system when it comes to treating the underprivileged. Medical students learn on the bodies of the poor―and the poor suffer from their mistakes. Rachel Pearson confronted these harsh realities when she started medical school in Galveston, Texas. In a free clinic where the motto is “All Are Welcome Here,” she learned to practice medicine with love and tenacity amidst the raging injustices of a system that favors the rich and the white. No Apparent Distress is at once an indictment of American health care and a deeply moving tale of one doctor’s coming-of-age.