The perfect gift for anyone contemplating medical school.
A young physician’s on-the-spot notes from her three-year residency in internal medicine, shaped into a collection of pithy, revealing little stories.
The stories, which range in length from a couple of pages to a dozen, begin with the first morning of Transue’s internship and end on the last evening of her residency. (She received her postgraduate training at four hospitals in Seattle.) The transformation from frazzled, uncertain intern to assured, competent physician is a long process, one the author reveals as exhausting, challenging, full of surprises, and often scary. Nearly half the stories take place during Transue’s first year: it’s as an intern that her experiences with patients are most intense, and it is the year in which she learns the most. Her rotation takes her through intensive care, cardiology, oncology, and the emergency room; death is no stranger in these places, and the narrative shows her growing acceptance of this fact of life. Throughout, the stories focus on patients and their conditions: the homeless man in ER who’s covered in bugs; the battered young liver patient who insists that her boyfriend would never hurt her despite black eyes, bruises, and a broken leg; the teenager wanting her first birth-control prescription; the 70-year-old woman learning that her late husband had given her a sexually transmitted disease; the old doctor dying of prostate cancer. Transue intersperses scenes from her private life—nightclubbing, dancing, sailing, working out at the gym—that offer a sharp contrast to her experiences inside hospital walls and give the reader as well as the author respite from disease and dying. In her second year, she becomes a resident, with responsibility for interns and students as well as for patients, a role that continues in her third year. By then, the excitement has faded, but her confidence has blossomed, and she is well launched in her medical career.
The perfect gift for anyone contemplating medical school.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32483-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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