KEY POINTS:
In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Lam, a doctor, has turned the daily grind of his profession into a series of fast-paced, high-tension, interconnected short stories. He takes the reader on a journey through the careers of four young and diverse medical students: Ming, Fitzgerald, Sri and Chen, as they learn not only a great deal about medicine and themselves, but about the two biggies: life and death.
The book opens with the hopeful students preparing for and sitting their entrance exams. It then moves chronologically through their first year of medical school, their initial appointments and, finally, their careers as specialists. As they progress, however, there is one thing that none of them can ever quite escape from, no matter how hard they try: death.
It shadows them in their daily lives, from the cold, hard reality of cadavers in anatomy class to the loss of patients and family members - not even their own mortality is immune from its clutches. The best stories are at the beginning and conclusion of this volume.
The opening three discuss each character's anxieties as they begin to forge a path in the scary, unknown world, while the final three focus on their total understanding of their places within the universe and how little they can really do or matter in the grand scheme of things.
The six stories that make up the stepping stones in this odyssey concern medical events that shape each character's inevitable outcome - interestingly, it is how they deal with their failures, rather than the successes, that has the greatest effect on their futures.
There is a touch of Dr House written into the dispassionate distance of the students, but this is tempered with a sprinkling of the human relationships that drive shows like Grey's Anatomy. Thus, Lam manages to construct real world situations and still not lose sight of the fact that the people who work in these jobs have needs and wants - they are, at the end of the day, human.
Each character initially wants to be a great doctor and save the world, but, as each career plateaus, this idealist dream is supplanted by more mature, realistic goals. For some, this is liberating. For others, it becomes a depressing sense of failure.
Lam has woven together a series of authentic, highly readable, medical tales about drive, passion, choices and love.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
By Vincent Lam (Fourth Estate $29.99)
* Steve Scott is an Auckland reviewer.
