Amusing medical stories as seen through the eyes of a new doctor.
Firsthand accounts of life as a newly graduated pediatric doctor.
When Rivkees (Pediatrics/Yale School of Medicine) entered his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, an institution affectionately nicknamed "Man's Greatest Hospital," he had recently graduated from a medical school in New Jersey. Like his fellow residents, some from austere schools like Harvard and Yale, he was not fully prepared for the demanding schedules, exhaustion and on-the-spot decisions required from a doctor on call. “[W]e soon saw that we were all the same—the same products of the same books, the same notes, and the same bland lectures,” writes the author. “We were to be later distinguished by our drive, creativity, and judgment.” Over time, and with the help of older doctors who had the patience and knowledge to diagnosis some bizarre cases, Rivkees learned the ins and outs of pediatric care. In short, almost abrupt prose, the author recalls riveting memories of those early years of practice when he had to learn how to start IVs in veins the size of pencil leads, how to diagnose rare diseases and how to deal with the agony of losing a patient. Threaded throughout the quick bedside stories of numerous patients are accounts of the humorous practical jokes Rivkees and his fellow residents played on one another to combat fatigue and boredom, including the theft of a 2,000-year-old mummy. Although many patients are introduced via emergency room or in-patient scenarios, most are abandoned in lieu of another tale, leaving readers to ponder what happened to that particular person after his or her hospital visit was over. Quick forays into the dates the author had with a variety of "Cathys" round out the reflections of a man who became a world leader in pediatrics and pediatric endocrinology.
Amusing medical stories as seen through the eyes of a new doctor.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9453-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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