The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine - Softcover

Huyler, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031242356X ISBN 13: 9780312423568

Publisher: Picador, 2004

Synopsis

Hailed by The Boston Globe as "a compact, faceted gem that shines with intelligence," this stunning collection offers a startling and moving look at people whose lives are on the line and the men and women who try to keep them from crossing it. These twenty-eight vignettes
seamlessly juxtapose visceral portrayals of life-and-death medical situations with lyrical meditations on the world of medicine and the world at large.

About this title

Review:

Forget the niceties of plot development and the easy moralizing of the television shows. There's nothing glamorous about a hospital emergency room, that arena where every human flaw and frailty is exposed.

Frank Huyler, a physician and poet, offers a sharp view of life-and-death realities. The emergency room, he writes in these affecting vignettes, is a place where the dominant mood is numbness, where doctors and patients alike have seen too much bloodshed and death. As a defensive reaction, Huyler writes, some doctors become addicted to drugs and other pastimes, while others assume arrogant, cavalier, or aloof airs. This is eminently understandable, and Huyler recounts the growing distance in his relationship with patients as "the earlier intimacy I had felt ... began to recede into the task." A fine storyteller, Huyler doesn't shy away from tales in which he comes up short, just as he shakes his head in bemusement at the ways of administrators and chiefs. In one episode, for instance, he writes of treating a comatose patient with aggressive measures under one attending physician's orders, then doing almost nothing under another's instructions. The patient "was gone from the waking world, as nearly dead as a human being can be, lying at the edge but never quite crossing over"--but, amazingly, he survived both his injuries and the conflict between the two doctors.

Reminiscent of the surgeon-essayist Richard Seltzer's best work, Huyler's memoirs take readers behind the surgical screen. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Frank Huyler’s first novel, The Laws of Invisible Things, will be published by Henry Holt in April 2004. His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, and Poetry, among others. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is an emergency physician.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 031242356X
• ISBN 13: 9780312423568
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176