When Carter first started teaching medical students, in the early 1990s, he was working in a VA hospital. Most of the patients were blue-collar guys who had fought in the Second World War. All you saw as a doctor, or medical student, were these dying old men. But if you got them talking, you’d hear the most amazing stories—how they once flew their fighter plane under the Golden Gate Bridge, how they had taken Iwo Jima. “All of us are like a story,” he’d tell students. “You’re seeing the last two pages of the book. You know so little about him. He was once a little kid. He was your age once.”
