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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
