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David Z Hirsch
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David J. Naiman
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Didn't Get Frazzled: humorous medical fiction Kindle Edition

by David Z Hirsch (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 229 ratings
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“…the best fictional portrayal of med school since ER.” – BlueInk Review (starred)

  • International Book Award Bronze Medal Winner Readers' Favorite (Fiction - Humor/Comedy)
  • INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist (Humor)


Medical student Seth Levine faces escalating stress and gallows humor as he struggles with the collapse of his romantic relationships and all preconceived notions of what it means to be a doctor. It doesn’t take long before he realizes not getting frazzled is the least of his problems.

Seth encounters a med student so arrogant he boasts that he’ll eat any cadaver part he can’t name, an instructor so dedicated she tests the student’s ability to perform a gynecological exam on herself, and a woman so captivating that Seth will do whatever it takes to make her laugh, including regale her with a story about a diagnostic squabble over an erection.

Didn’t Get Frazzled captures with distressing accuracy the gauntlet idealistic medical students must face to secure an MD and, against the odds, come out of it a better human being.


This comedy-drama is an exciting addition to the grand tradition of medical novels by Samuel Shem, Lisa Genova, and Noah Gordon.

"Didn't Get Frazzledlets you live the medical school experience from a safe and sane distance. It's most highly recommended." - Readers' Favorite



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  1. Print length
    389 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publication date
    April 12 2016
  5. File size
    837 KB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  9. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

David Z Hirsch grew up on the steppes of Nebraska peddling Kool-Aid off I-129 until saving up enough cash for medical school. After graduation, he moved to Pyongyang to teach pre-med classes at Kim Il-sung University. He soon fell out of favor and was imprisoned at Kaechon where he traded medical favors for soup and toilet paper until he made a daring escape across the border. Dr. Hirsch subsisted for the next three years by foraging gooseberries and licking the dew off spiny toads. This led to a burst of creativity, and he wrote the first draft of Didn't Get Frazzled on bark peeled off a dying Manchurian Ash tree. Ultimately discovered in a semi-feral state by the China Coast Guard flotilla from Liaoning, Dr. Hirsch returned to the United States sixty pounds lighter but more inspired than ever. David Z Hirsch is a pen name, so absolutely nothing in the above paragraphs are true. This is not lying, you see. It's fiction. Many well-regarded sources insist that these are two distinct things. The actual guy who wrote this novel is a practicing physician in Maryland. His life story is considerably more prosaic, but in his head he lives a fascinating, fascinating life.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01DOHSK0M
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 837 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 389 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 229 ratings

About the authors

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Previous page
  1. David Z Hirsch

    David Z Hirsch

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    David Z Hirsch grew up on the steppes of Nebraska peddling Kool-Aid off I-129 until saving up enough cash for medical school. After graduation, he moved to Pyongyang to teach pre-med classes at Kim Il-sung University. He soon fell out of favor and was imprisoned at Kaechon where he traded medical favors for soup and toilet paper until he made a daring escape across the border.

    Dr. Hirsch subsisted for the next three years by foraging gooseberries and licking the dew off spiny toads. This led to a burst of creativity, and he wrote the first draft of Didn’t Get Frazzled on bark peeled off a dying Manchurian Ash tree. Ultimately discovered in a semi-feral state by the China Coast Guard flotilla from Liaoning, Dr. Hirsch returned to the United States sixty pounds lighter but more inspired than ever.

    David Z Hirsch is a pen name, so absolutely nothing in the above paragraphs are true. This is not lying, you see. It’s fiction. Many well-regarded sources insist that these are two distinct things. The actual guy who wrote this novel is a practicing physician in Maryland. His life story is considerably more prosaic, but in his head he lives a fascinating, fascinating life.

    See more on the author's page
  2. David J. Naiman

    David J. Naiman

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    David J. Naiman is a best-selling independent author of award-winning books for children, teens, and adults including Jake, Lucid Dreamer: first-place winner of the Purple Dragonfly Book Award and gold-medal winner of the Moonbeam Children's Book Awards, The Finest Lies: Best Teen Book Award finalist Indies Today, and Didn’t Get Frazzled, humorous medical fiction written under the pen name David Z Hirsch.

    When he’s not writing, David toils in the front lines of primary care, battling scourges like diabetes, heart disease, and insurance companies, although probably not in that order. He lives with his wife and two children in Maryland. Visit him at www.davidjnaiman.wordpress.com

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
229 global ratings

Top reviews from Canada

Chillyfinger
5.0 out of 5 stars Story Telling At Its Best
Reviewed in Canada on June 21, 2017
Verified Purchase
This book sucked me in on page 1 and I was unable to put it down until i finished it.

Stories about the stressful life of medical students are hardly new, nor is there much left to say about the difficulty of finding romance in the pressure cooker of modern professional life. What Hirsch does is write about these things with such spare simplicity and honesty that the reader is seduced into "being there" from the first paragraph. There is not a word out of place, not a character or situation that doesn't ring true.
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Aurora Dawn
5.0 out of 5 stars How To Survive Med School
Reviewed in Canada on September 21, 2019
I LOVED this story.
Although it's billed as fiction, I'm betting there's a good deal of real life experience in this laugh out loud look at the life of a young med school student doing his hospital rotations. It's told with a self-depreciating humor and accurately portrays the exhaustion young med students feel, the struggles to maintain any kind of rewarding social or romantic life and the daily comedies and tragedies of life in a busy hospital. Written in simple language and with explanations for the technical bits, you don't need to be a medical professional to enjoy the ride as our hero makes his way through 4 years of medical studies.
Well worth your time if you're looking for something a little different from your normal hospital thriller or medical romance.
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Pete Barber (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars the author includes a smattering of well-considered social commentary on what exactly makes a good doctor. He educated me on the tremendous stresses ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2017
Although the author’s name is fictional, this story was written by an M.D., which leads to some medical terms that left me somewhat cross-eyed. However, the authenticity of the main character's experience as he stumbles through medical school, made the Latin inconsequential.

Be warned, if you buy this book and read it in a public place, you may well embarrass yourself by laughing aloud. Well, the laughter might not cause you a red face, but if you have to explain what is so funny--good luck with that!

Along with lighthearted humor where the reader is laughing along with the main character and not at others, the author includes a smattering of well-considered social commentary on what exactly makes a good doctor. He educated me on the tremendous stresses endured not just by medical students, but also by those already qualified doctors who are expected to teach as well as perform their onerous duties on a hospital ward. For Seth, the stress extends beyond the hospital wards and stretches his personal relationships to breaking point.

In summary, this is a terrific read. For a doctor, the author’s writing is beautifully clear and accessible--see what I did there? At 99 cents on Kindle, this is a bargain you shouldn’t miss.

Disclaimer: This review was originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. I may have received a free review copy.
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Top reviews from other countries

Joy Cagil
5.0 out of 5 stars A Memoir-like Story of Stress, Drama, and Sense of Humor,
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2019
Verified Purchase
I absolutely adored this book. In fact, I’ll read it again maybe a year or so later, and I never read a book twice. This may be partly because I have a few doctors close to me in my family. Now, I so feel for them!

A tiny part of my appreciation of this book has to do with the words this author taught me. I mean how else could I find out that borborygmus meant stomach gurgling!

There is some humor in the writing, true, but most of it reeked with stress, especially for the main character, Seth Levine. I can’t imagine how he could cope. Because of him, I got mad at April. I am still annoyed with her. I don’t like selfish, stupid women like her.

Most of the characters in the story are flawed and rightfully so. Who wouldn’t under such pressing situations! Each character, primary or secondary, was depicted through keen insight without unnecessary narration or wordiness. Moreover, the characters were of diverse backgrounds and different from one another.

The story is told through the first-person point of view, which is Seth’s. As the protagonist, there is much to be admired in him. Despite everything, he copes and he understands. Why, he even understands April! I especially liked that he didn’t suffer a breakdown. Anyone else would.

During Seth’s four years of Medical School, I found his third year to be the most outstanding and informative (for me), plus the fourth year’s psychiatry training. Also, that the author tells of his experiences year by year helped my grasp of his situation much better.

In my point of view, this is not a funny book. It actually has high drama sometimes presented with a sense of humor. This makes it entertaining and informative, and it draws the readers into the story.

Anyone who reads and understands this book will probably never badmouth a doctor. By the same token, this book shouldn’t be offered to students who may be planning to become a doctor; otherwise, we’d have a doctor shortage in the country.
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MegaReader
5.0 out of 5 stars 5 Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 23, 2018
Verified Purchase
It's not very often I come across a humorous book where the author has just the same dry sense of humour as I have. I found this out to my delight by reading 'Didn't Get Frazzled' by David Z. Hirsch, MD. Mr Hirsch has written about what he knows, having qualified as a doctor many years ago. He writes from the heart in much gory detail about Seth Levine's years as a medical student, and interspersed with this is Seth's failing relationship with girlfriend April.

The writing is intelligent and witty, and although some parts I would rather not have read (the gynaecological examination of an obese woman - ugh, and the autopsy of a baby), I did enjoy this book. I've known plenty of consultants who think they're God. These doctors have an inbuilt certainty that they're right and they look down on everybody else from a lofty height, especially the poor old medical student and the patient (I've seen medical students literally quaking on ward rounds after being grilled by a particularly obnoxious consultant). However, Seth has the ideal personality to succeed as a doctor - he refuses to get frazzled.
It would be interesting to read a follow up to this book, to see how Seth fares as a qualified doctor. Recommended 5 star read for fans of witty medical 'faction'.
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Pat Shaw
4.0 out of 5 stars Didn’t get frazzled
Reviewed in Australia on April 12, 2020
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A very entertaining book about the trials an d tribulations of a med student, had me hooked from the start
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Trevor Coote
4.0 out of 5 stars Did Get Dazzled
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2017
Verified Purchase
Maybe the world is divided into two types of people: those who choose to do the stomach-churning things that doctors and nurses are obliged to do, and those who wonder why on earth people would choose to do the stomach-churning things that doctors and nurse are obliged to do. This delightful book helps explain why. Dress it up how you like, in the end it is the old clichés: ‘to help people’, ‘to make a difference’, ‘job satisfaction’.
The author, thinly disguised as Seth Levine, sensitive medical student, narrates in a series of detailed, amusing and grisly anecdotes the dedication, stress and privation required during student years to eventually become a successful medical practitioner. Much of the medical narrative is extremely gory and some quite upsetting. But does this make good entertainment? Well yes, if it is related with empathy and put into context which it is here. The hours that the young medics work play such havoc with their own personal lives, and sometimes their health, that you cannot help but sympathise with their own privations and frequent resorts to gallows humour. Didn’t Get Dazzled tries, largely successfully, to show how young medical students juggle the stress of endless study, long hours and constant pressure with desperate attempts to forge longer-term relationships outside of work. Not surprisingly, Seth and his girlfriend April struggle, and his colleagues and fellow students all struggle, with trying to create solid and meaningful, romantic lives in a ‘surreal alternative universe that no outsider could truly fathom’.
As well-written and thoroughly enjoyable as the book is, it comes across as the fleshing out of private journals written during college years with the names of real characters changed to save embarrassment (or litigation). It is as if the author wished to include all the experiences and in-jokes of those years in novel form before his memories blurred into little, half-forgotten fragments (only a follow up work will show otherwise.) The result is this: a work overly physically descriptive but looser on the more penetrative psychological side because of it – but only just. First rate, nevertheless.
Just a quibble on the formatting in order to make a more comfortable read: The line spacing needs to be closer (unmanageable on my Kindle, at least), and the first line of new paragraphs, especially where there is speech, needs indenting on the left.
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teachlz
4.0 out of 5 stars Medical Antics..
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2017
Verified Purchase
I would like to thank the author for a copy of "Didn't Get Frazzled" for my honest review. The genres of this book are Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, and Humor.

In "Didn't Get Frazzled", David Z. Hirsch describes the quirky and zany characters in their first years of Medical School.

Seth Levine, portrayed as insecure in his private relationships, but amazingly professional as a medical student, intern, then resident, narrates the story. He introduces us to his friends, colleagues, physicians and supporting staff.

Seen through Seth's eyes, some of the interns and physicians are indifferent, callous, rude, uncaring and unprofessional to the medical students as well as the patients. Seth seems to have a knack for providing compassion and understanding to patients,who are frightened and worried. He helps as best that he can answering their questions and listening to their concerns. His supervisors don't seem to get the whole picture, and as frustrating as that is David calmly does the best that he can and "doesn't get frazzled."

As the medical students become aware of the various rotations in the hospital, they have to become adept at learning and doing. As interns, they have to become more adept at doing, and making decisions on their own.

This might seem serious, but David Z Hirsch, describes the settings and the characters in a humorous way. I found myself laughing out loud at certain settings.

David Z. Hirsch describes the medical relationships, and the patients who become well, and those that don't. There is the sadness and frustration and anger, when a patient dies. Of course a hospital is a setting of life and death.

Seth also provides information on his single friends, and their relationships. There are times when it is important to have someone to talk too. How does one separate their private lives from their professional ones?

This was an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it.
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