BLUE COLLAR, BLUE SCRUBS

In a prequel to his skillful memoir of his residency days, Hot Lights, Cold Steel (2005), orthopedic surgeon Collins reflects on his life before and during medical school.

The author opens with a portrait of his 24-year-old self, a beer-guzzling Irish Catholic construction worker in Chicago who spent his days throwing broken slabs of concrete into a truck. After deciding that he wanted to do something more noble with his life, he quickly discovered that becoming a doctor took a different kind of hard work—specifically, two years of tough science courses before he could even apply to medical school. But Collins accepted the challenge and gained entrance to Loyola University School of Medicine in Chicago. The first year, he reports, was a dry, sterile time when students were asked only to memorize facts, but not to analyze why. Despite what his professors claimed, watching an autopsy did not reveal the secrets of life. As the author describes it, beginning students were given the mechanics of medicine but not its spirit. Collins ably conveys the excitement and uncertainty of a second-year student grappling for the first time with practical chores, and he writes movingly of his painful experiences with patients—a badly burned infant, a woman dying of cancer—and of his reactions to the cynicism of some older physicians. As in his first memoir, the author shares hilarious details of his personal life, his loving but disrespectful brothers—“I make the mistake of mentioning to my brothers that I’m thinking about becoming a doctor. Denny says that’s interesting because he’s thinking about becoming Pope. Tim says he’s thinking about becoming a boxer and kicking Muhammad Ali’s ass”—and especially his courtship of the remarkably patient Patti, their marriage and the birth of their first child. Collins has a superb ear for dialogue, and his breezy style makes his world spring to life. What lingers, though, is the humanity.

Perfect graduation gift for a pre-med major, or even a bright young bricklayer.