{"product_id":"9780871408754","title":"Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA \u003cem\u003eBookPage\u003c\/em\u003e Best Book of 2014\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  “[Terrence Holt] is Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious.”—Junot Díaz\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e  Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. \"Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives,\" \u003cem\u003eInternal Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.  \u003cp\u003eHolt's debut collection of short stories, \u003cem\u003eIn the Valley of the Kings\u003c\/em\u003e, was praised by the \u003cem\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e as one of \"those works of genius\" that \"will endure for as long as our hurt kind remains to require their truth.\" Now he returns with \u003cem\u003eInternal Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e—a work based on his own experiences as a physician— offering an insider's access to the long night of the hospital, where the intricacies of medical technology confront the mysteries of the human spirit.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003e\"A Sign of Weakness\" takes us through a grueling nightlong vigil at the bedside of a dying woman. In her \"small whimpering noises, rhythmic, paced almost to the beating of my heart,\" a doctor confronts his own helplessness, clinging \"like a child to the thought of morning.\" In the unforgettable \"Giving Bad News,\" we struggle with a man who maddeningly, terrifyingly refuses to remember his terminal diagnosis, forcing us to tell him, again and again, what we never should have wanted to tell him at all.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eAt the bedside of a hospice patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, in \"The Surgical Mask,\" we reach the limits of what we are able to face in human suffering, in our own horror at what happens to our bodies as they die.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eIn the psychiatric hospital of \"Iron Maiden,\" a routine chest X-ray opens a window onto a nightmare vision of medieval torture and a recognition of how our mortality drives all of us to madness.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eIn these four stories, and five others, \u003cem\u003eInternal Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e captures the doctor's struggle not only with sickness, suffering, and death but the fears and frailties each of us—patient and doctor alike—brings to the bedside. In a powerful alchemy of insight and compassion, Holt reveals how those vulnerabilities are the foundations of caring. Intensely realized, gently ironic, heartfelt and heartbreaking, \u003cem\u003eInternal Medicine\u003c\/em\u003e is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Liveright Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47012380213488,"sku":"9780871408754","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780871408754_p0.jpg?v=1763844845","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780871408754","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}