Doing Nothing is a story of the education of a physician. It starts with Richard Grollman's first day in medical school and ends as he walks out of the hospital where he has just completed his residency in internal medicine. In between, he is ignored, pummeled, encouraged to seek a different profession, admonished by God to behave himself a little better, discovers that the brain is not a vital organ, is sucked into a black hole along with thousands of lost lab reports, inadvertently becomes chief medical resident, and finally discovers he has learned a lot about people and medicine. If only by osmosis.