Charles Sherman began his medical career with the AIDS epidemic and retired from clinical practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over his forty-year medical career, he served as a board-certified internist, pulmonologist, and critical care specialist and as a public health epidemiologist. He was an Associate Professor of Medicine (Clinician Educator) at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he was acknowledged as an award-winning clinician and teacher. He published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, editorials, and textbook chapters. For much of his career, Dr. Sherman worked on medical projects in Latin America, Africa, and Eurasia, often in leadership roles.

House Calls Around the World is a collection of his most often told medical stories, many from his global health experiences. The narratives range from a spiritual encounter on the Navajo reservation to performing bronchoscopy on a clouded leopard at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. Along the way, the reader joins him in small village clinics around Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, a crowded medical ward in Eldoret, Kenya, and an extreme resistant tuberculosis unit in Hlotse, Lesotho.

In addition, Dr. Sherman shares his insights into the burgeoning field of global medicine, including the need to replace self-serving ‘duffle bag medicine’ with long-term, sustainable local healthcare. He also humorously recounts his most significant cultural gaffs like the time he unintentionally insulted the national bread of Ethiopia, injera, by comparing its appearance to interstitial lung disease.

Interwoven in all these stories are vignettes about his personal life that made him the physician he ultimately became and the person he aspired to be (even his fictitious elderly self).

This is his first book publication.