Docs Are Human Too
Written: Dec 14 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: startlingly realistic; slyly, darkly, humorous; powerful; potent; prestigious (winner of the 2006 Giller Prize)
Cons: early stories less assured than later ones; women doctors portrayed as dispassionate/insensitive/distracted
The Bottom Line: A powerful and extraordinary series of short stories linked by common characters who interact and evolve through medical school and the early years of their chosen career.
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| jc_hall's Full Review: Vincent Lam - Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures |
Torontonian Vincent Lam (part-time author, full-time emergency room physician) makes an astounding literary debut with this novel-length compilation of short stories that follow a small group of young medics from pre-med through medical school and onto their early years of practice as fully-fledged physicians.
In How To Get Into Medical School (Parts I and II), we meet seemingly dispassionate Ming and her study partner Fitzgerald. Poles apart in temperament and ambition (Ming is obsessively focused, Fitz less strategic in his study habits), they nevertheless fall in love. Their courtship is understatedly hilarious and their subsequent break-up so excruciating to read about that you realise with a start that the characters have already got under your skin this early on in the book.
In Take All of Murphy, we meet Sri and Chen, Ming’s dissection partners. Sri is the gentle one who refuses to cut through a biblical tattoo on their cadaver’s arm while Chen is the diplomat who tries to arbitrate between Sri and Ming. Sri believes in respecting a man’s symbols while Ming is all for following dissecting instructions by the manual. Do compassion and empathy make for the better doctor?
Code Clock is a short piece that gives you an idea of what really goes through the doctors’ heads when they’re called to a Code Blue and desperately try to resuscitate a patient. It’s Fitz’s first, but hey, don’t they go by a certain mantra—Watch One, Do One, Teach One—at medical school? Would certainly make you think twice about staying at a teaching hospital if you have anything life-threatening.
A Long Migration has Chen shadowing his cancer-ridden grandfather, an old gentleman of interesting background who is at the end of his life.
In Winston, Sri is intrigued by a patient who is convinced that he has been poisoned by his attractive neighbour and that she and her husband are planning to murder him. Winston is certainly disturbed, but is he psychotic? Could he be at risk of harming himself and others? Uncharacteristic of a present-day doctor, compassionate Sri visits Winston at home and gets into a sticky situation. Told mostly from Winston’s perspective, this is a compelling look into the mind of someone who’s mentally disturbed.
In Eli, Fitz has to deal with a violent prisoner who’s escorted to the emergency room by the police. This story not only details the hazards a working emergency room physician has to face but also the dynamics between the police, the prisoners, and the medical staff.
Afterwards tells the story of what happens when a man dies while being serviced in a ‘hair salon’ and cannot be resuscitated at hospital, and his wife decides to go retrieve his missing hat from the ‘hair salon’ owner. Black humour at its most devastating.
An Insistent Tide is both surrealistic and excruciatingly realistic—a pregnant woman is about to give birth and all is not going well. Her husband is struggling to return from a business trip in horrendous weather and is blissfully unaware of the magnitude of her suffering. The pace and suspense build with unnerving intensity before crashing, the reader left breathless and horror-stricken. Told from the pregnant woman’s point of view, this is surely plotted and deeply insightful. A harrowing read.
Night Flight catches up with Fitz after his alcohol abuse forces him to leave the hospital and sign on as a flight doctor. A Canadian holidaying abroad in South America has succumbed to a stroke. His young wife has re-mortgaged their house to fly him home, as their insurance refuses to pay up. Could he have had better chances of survival if it had happened back home? The devoted wife might be better off not knowing the cruel truth.
In Contact Tracing, both Fitz and Chen become infected with SARS. How they, and other medical staff, cope with the epidemic, makes for fascinating reading for those of us who have no knowledge of what went on behind the scenes at many hospitals during that crucial period.
Before Light follows Chen as he goes through a night shift, something he hates. It details not only the immense duties that overwhelm a night-shift emergency physician, but also the mind-set of the doctor as he prepares for, goes through, and then completes his superhuman task in a very human frame of mind.
You may think you know what goes on in a hospital emergency room from watching all those seasons of ER, but until you read Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, you have no idea how real emergency room physicians really feel about their jobs. Vincent Lam has cut through the gloss, the veneer of all-knowing invincibility, the aura of heroism and sainthood, to the very human hearts beating within bodies that are just as mortal as ours.
Like the rest of us, doctors come in all shapes and sizes, personalities and temperaments, varying degrees of competence and ambition. All Lam’s doctors are flawed human beings, with various backgrounds that inform and affect their lives, their loves, and their career paths. It is fascinating to be given an insider’s view into their work and personal lives, and in such a well-drawn, exciting, and occasionally disturbing manner.
Many of the stories reveal ethical and moral dilemmas, which lend a deeper potency that goes beyond the immediate appreciation of a good story well told. But most of all, by revealing the innermost thoughts, hopes and desires of a very privileged few, the author has humanized these occasionally god-like beings, a state of affairs that may not go down well with some, but which I, for one, profoundly appreciate. Not only has Vincent Lam not done a disservice to his compatriots, he has accorded this rare breed a degree of humanity that cries out for, that demands and compels empathy and understanding from everyone else.
If you’d rather not think of your doctor as fallible, then this may not be a book you’d care to read. But if you’re fascinated by these human beings struggling daily to perform superhuman tasks, you cannot afford to miss this. There’s a reason it won the Giller Prize.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 53 members
About Me:
Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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