A volume brimming with humanitarian lessons in medicine and life alike.
Stories drawn from five decades of work in emergency medicine.
Seward, a retired physician, condenses his years of rewarding and compassionate service into a volume of anecdotes that accurately reflect what he has learned from both his colleagues and his patients. A thoughtful, dynamic writer, he shares not only the compelling events that transpire in the emergency room but also what it feels like to work there. He first reflects on medical school training in his 20s and how the semantics of medicine and his beliefs now as a retired physician in his 70s have changed. “I believe that the principal reason we are on this planet,” he writes, “is to have our noses constantly rubbed in our obligation to care about people who are strangers to us.” His daily experiences from years working on both coasts are consistently compelling: assessing dire end-of-life prognoses, complex cases as a medical student at Boston City Hospital, navigating patient assaults, and treating critical cases involving children. Among the more memorable bedside anecdotes include the poignant opening reflection of a dying young man with a debilitating brain injury and a rather grisly episode of a gardener whose co-worker impaled his neck with pruning shears. While recounting other ordeals, the author provides conversational commentary on the bilateral symmetry of the human form, the author’s original desire to be a pediatrician and his crash education in the intensive care nursery, the delicate mechanics of Foley catheter and endotracheal tube insertion, and the characteristics of certain respected and inspirational colleagues. Each of these vignettes creates a fascinating and engrossing experience useful for both medical professionals or anyone with even a casual interest in clinical life. The common thread they share is the unconditional compassionate care extended by a seasoned physician who put his heart and soul into every human encounter.
A volume brimming with humanitarian lessons in medicine and life alike.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-88-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
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