Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

Description

A collection of essays about life as a surgical intern. Terrence Holt brings a writer's eye and a doctor's touch to this powerful account of residency. Intense, ironic, heartfelt, and heartbreaking, these nine vivid stories put us at 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, at a life-and-death effort to keep an oxygen mask on a claustrophobic patient, and in the lounge of a snowbound hospital where doctors swap yarns through the night. Out of these 'dioramas from the Museum of Human Misery,' Holt draws meaning, beauty, wonder, and truth. Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, these stories evoke Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams, admitting readers to the beating heart of medicine. Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.

Terrence Holt is the author of In the Valley of the Kings.

'(Terrence Holt) is Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious.' - Junot Diaz