Books: European Bestseller

THE DOCTORS (441 pp.)—Andre Soubiran—Putnam ($3.95).

One of the bestselling books in Europe is a novel about doctors. Its hero, Jean Nérac, tells his own first-person story as a student at the Paris Faculty of Medicine.

The reader follows Jean into a dissecting room, where he cuts up cadavers; a slum, where he meets a leper; a hovel, where he hears a baby "leave the mother's belly with a moist squelching sound"; a ward, where he observes a woman choke to death of slow asphyxia, and hears from the puffed lips of a badly burned man "the most piercing shrieks that suffering can...