Direct Red: A Surgeons Story Air/Ire/Exp - Softcover

Gabriel Weston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224085638 ISBN 13: 9780224085632

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Synopsis

How does it feel to hold someone`s life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else`s body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In the tradition of Atul Gawande and Sherwin B. Nuland comes an eloquent and piercing account of a young woman's surgical education.

Surgeons have long been known for their allergy to doubt, an unsurprising trait in professionals who must play God, routinely risking someone else's life in order to do their job. But in this illuminating memoir, Gabriel Weston reveals the emotions, passions, and doubts normally hidden behind a surgeon's mask.

Weston, a surgeon, is also a writer of extraordinary gifts. Compassionate and truthful, her voice brings us into a theater we are normally not allowed to enter. At Weston's side, we learn what it's like to stand in an operating room holding someone's neck open for seven hours, what happens when the line between the personal and the professional begins to blur, and about the shame of watching a patient die. Interweaving her own story with those of her patients, old and young, Weston evokes both the humor and the heartbreak that come from medicine's daily confrontation with the ultimate unknowability of the human body. With prose that does not flinch from the raw, graphic realities of a surgeon's day, Weston confronts life, death, and the unique difficulties of being a female surgeon in a heavily male-dominated profession.

About the Author:

Educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, Gabriel Weston studied English literature at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London. She went on to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and is a part-time ear, nose, and throat surgical specialist. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• ISBN 10: 0224085638
• ISBN 13: 9780224085632
• Binding: Paperback