Internal Medicine A Doctor's Stories

Internal Medicine : A Doctor's Stories
ISBN: 9781863956901
Publication Date: 27 August 2014

Terrence Holt, whose In the Valley of the Kings was hailed as a 'work of genius' (New York Times) and made Amazon's Top Ten Short Story Collections of the year, brings a writer's eye to his experiences as a first-year graduate doctor.

Intense, ironic, heartfelt, and heartbreaking, these nine vivid episodes take us to the bedside of a patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, through a nightmarish struggle to convince a man that he has cancer, to a life-and-death effort to keep an oxygen mask on a claustrophobic patient, and into the lounge of a snowbound hospital where doctors swap yarns through the night.

Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, Holt's writing evokes Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams. Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

The tradition of doctors who write is a long and honourable one. Chekhov is the most famous, but there are many others - Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, and one of my personal favourites, our own Karen Hitchcock. It's hardly surprising; writing up case notes delivers a ready-made narrative, and patients are often compelling characters in the way they respond to illness and treatment. The patient/doctor relationship is one of intimacy and often unwanted drama: how do you tell someone they are going to die

Pivoting on this and other sensitive issues, US doctor Terence Holt takes the genre to a whole new level. His collection of stories based on his experiences at the front line of Emergency, Intensive Care and other hospital rounds is told with rare professional humility: unlike most physicians, he is prepared to admit that he's been wrong; he's scarily honest about near-misses and the almost ov...