As engagement with the electronic medical record has taken time away from bedside interactions in medical education, rheumatologist Jason Liebowitz wanted to capture a crucial aspect of training that he sees, sadly, diminishing — the wisdom and insight gained from working with master clinicians.

“There’s only so much you can gain from reading a standard textbook about clinical excellence or clinical reasoning. It doesn’t really convey what you get when you have the opportunity to work in person, one-on-one with a true master clinician,” says Liebowitz ’13, who completed his residency and fellowship training at Johns Hopkins and is now an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

In an effort to convey these invaluable lessons in clinical excellence — on topics ranging from patient communication to mentorship to burnout — Liebowitz, along with rheumatologists Philip Seo of Johns Hopkins and Marcy Bolster of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, solicited and edited a collection of 25 introspective essays from an interdisciplinary group of master clinicians who are also compelling writers. The result: Masterclass in Medicine: Lessons from the Experts.

Seo was Liebowitz’s fellowship program director at Johns Hopkins; the two first met when Liebowitz was in his residency. And Johns Hopkins is well-represented among the group of authors, who weave together foundational stories from their own educations and careers.

David Hellmann, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Medicine, opens his chapter “Partnering with Patients” with a story from his first year of residency. He witnessed another physician ask a patient, a truck driver, what could be causing the patient’s mysterious, multisystem illness that had stumped a team of doctors. The patient, who had recently driven through the California desert, had read about truckers developing “Valley Fever,” or coccidioidomycosis. The fungal infection is borne from spores found in desert sand. Could that be it, he wondered? The patient’s suspicion turned out to be true. Hellman goes on to say that partnering with patients has “helped [him] become a better healer and added immeasurable joy, satisfaction, meaning, and wonder to [his] professional life.”

Roy Ziegelstein, vice dean for education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, contributed “Personomics,” a chapter on the term he coined that brings together the information physicians need to know to provide individualized care — the “psychological, social, cultural, behavioral, economic and unique life circumstances,” he writes. “Medicine is the most wonderful career in the world, and getting to know the patient is the most wonderful part of the practice of medicine.”

Seo points to Suzanne Koven ’86, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was an assistant chief of service in the Osler Medical Residency, who explained in a recent authors chat what unites the writers of the book.

“She said what everyone had in common was the love that they have for their patients, the love that they have for learning, the love that they have for their colleagues — that all of them brought their love to the profession, and that’s what drives them forward,” he says. “Even though we, from the outside, think of them as masters, they are still learning eagerly from each other.”

Liebowitz hopes medical students and young physicians read the book to get the kind of bedside wisdom they might be missing.

“We want someone reading this book to feel like they’re having a conversation with these great doctors.”