Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures: Stories - Softcover

Lam, Vincent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385661444 ISBN 13: 9780385661447

Publisher: Anchor Canada, 2006

Synopsis

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures welcomes readers into a world where the most mundane events can quickly become life or death. By following four young medical students and physicians – Ming, Fitz, Sri and Chen – this debut collection from 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam is a riveting, eye-opening account of what it means to be a doctor. Deftly navigating his way through 12 interwoven short stories, the author explores the characters’ relationships with each other, their patients, and their careers. Lam draws on his own experience as an emergency room physician and shares an insider’s perspective on the fears, frustrations, and responsibilities linked with one of society’s most highly regarded occupations.

“I wanted to write about the way in which a person changes as they become a physician — how their world view shifts, and how they become a slightly different version of themselves in the process of becoming a doctor,” Lam explains. “I wanted to write about the reality that doing good and trying to help others is not simple. It is ethically complicated and sometimes involves a reality that can only be expressed by telling a story.”

In the book’s first story, “How to Get into Medical School, Part 1,” students Ming and Fitz wrestle with their opposing personalities and study techniques, while coming to terms with a growing emotional connection that elicits disapproval from Ming’s traditional Chinese-Canadian parents. Lam’s exceptional talent for describing scenarios with great precision is showcased in “Take All of Murphy,” when Ming, Chen, and Sri find themselves at a moral crossroads while dissecting a cadaver. Throughout the book, readers are treated to the physicians’ internal thoughts and the mental drama involved with treating patients, including Fitz’s struggle with self-doubt in “Code Clock” and Chen’s boredom and exhaustion in “Before Light.”

From delivering babies to evacuating patients and dealing with deadly viruses, the four primary characters in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures are made thoroughly human by Lam’s insightful detail, realistic dialogue, and expert storytelling. The medical world is naturally filled with drama, but it’s the author’s ability to give equal weight to the smaller moments that really brings this book to life.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

With their scalpel-sharp prose and unflinching gaze, the stories in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures introduce a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction.
In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam holds in delicate and skillful tension black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic and matter-of-fact portrait of today's medical profession.
He brings to vivid and convincing life the disparate but interdependent worlds of school and home, heartbreaking young love and life-altering fear in stories that introduce us to Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri, young medical school students and doctors in Toronto.
In "How To Get Into Medical School," the impulsive Fitz and the ultra-rational Ming explore the possibilities of a relationship that is tested, first by the vigilance of a disapproving family and then by the extraordinary commitment demanded of medical students. In "Take All of Murphy," three students face the challenge of their first dissection of a corpse -- and the unusual quandary of deciding whether following the anatomy textbook or keeping a tattoo intact is more important. And in "A Long Migration," perhaps the most lyrical of the stories, we see beyond Chen's immediate world into the past of his family, and in particular that of his grandfather. Once a high-living and flamboyant member of the Chinese expatriate community in Saigon before the Vietnam War, now Percival Chen is dying in a Brisbane retirement home, and his grandson's modern medical recommendations must make way for older potions that arrive for Percival from an older world.
Riveting and precise, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures lookswith rigorous honesty at the specificities of the lives of doctors and their patients and brings us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all.
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is an astonishing literary debut, a collection of mature and intricate stories connected through the relationships that develop among a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses.

From the Back Cover:

The most mundane events can quickly become life or death. At once riveting and precise, these stories are eye-opening accounts of what it means to be a doctor. Vincent Lam draws upon his insider s perspective on the fears and frustrations of a world where challenges surge all around. Using scalpel-sharp prose, he delivers a shockingly realistic portrait of the medical profession. In the four stories included in this audiobook, William Johnston and Michael Scholar Jr. make Vincent Lam s characters thoroughly human with insightful detail, realistic dialogue, and expert narration.

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Canada
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0385661444
• ISBN 13: 9780385661447
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 355