Rough Sleepers

Rough Sleepers is Tracy Kidder's account of Dr. Jim O'Connell, a physician who devised ways to build a community of care for a city's homeless population, including the people who sleep outdoors, known as rough sleepers. The city is Boston, and O'Connell's work is tied to the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. The book is an example of how one person can make a real difference.

The story begins when O'Connell has graduated from Harvard Medical School and is nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. The chief of medicine asks him to put off a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to set up an organization that would bring health care to homeless people. He accepts because he feels unable to say no, and that single year becomes his life's work.

Kidder spent five years following O'Connell and his colleagues as they treated thousands of homeless patients. Readers go along as O'Connell moves around the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor and friendship to some of its most vulnerable residents. His approach to medicine puts the patient first, with patients and providers joined in what he calls "a system of friends."

Kidder is also the author of The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains.