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Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (Vintage)
by: Pauline W. Chen |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 609 EAN: 9780307275370 Edition: Reprint ISBN: 030727537X Label: Vintage Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 288 Publication Date: January 08, 2008 Publisher: Vintage Release Date: January 08, 2008 Studio: Vintage
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| Customer Reviews | ||
  - A Courageous BookThis book is a call for doctors to provide comfort to patients when cures are no longer viable. She urges doctors to engage with persons as a complex, integrated whole rather than as an impersonal clinical case. The book is a heart felt philosophical argument against medical deconstructivism that illicits almost knee-jerk "do something" responds to illnesses. Complicated ritualistic processes or treatment algorithms focus on the disease rather than the person who suffers. Dr. Chen is amazingly courageous in writing this much needed book and she openly questions herself as well as the medical culture and educative process that "made her." Rating: - Wow. I picked up Final Exam from the "new" table while perusing a used bookstore. It spoke to me as I was struggling with the loss of a dear friend. While this dear friend was a canine, it brought to the surface the fact that I don't acknowledge one of life's most unavoidable truths very well. To think that doctors didn't either both scared and enticed me into the impulse purchase. Chen's writing is so adaptable, at once crisp and purposeful but never too cold or stale. From early on I was amazed at her openness and honesty, about a subject that clearly many of her counterparts would not appreciate as it would only call forward their own challenges and failings. The prime element of handling mortality is woven through HER story which she presents with interesting detail about childhood, medical school and clinical training. Interwoven are brief intimate looks into the lives of some of her patients, and you come away from the book feeling more human and more educated. Rating: - A touching memoirPauline Chen has written a touching memoir, one that captures the emotions of patients and their physicians that must confront their own mortality. From experiences with death as an adolescent to the daily experience of a transplant surgeon with life and death issues, Pauline beautifully captures her and her patient's emotions and courage with life threatening illnesses. This book should be required reading for all medical students and has a lot to offer for anyone interested in how physicians and their patients deal with life and death. Rating:  - Transplanting your liverThoughtful and moving essays by a transplant surgeon with roots in Taiwan, which cut to the bone of death and dying, or morbidity and mortality as the docs may put it. Rating: - Death from a diferent perspectiveA moving narrative of Dr. Chan's professional life beginning as a medical student and then as a transplant surgeon. As a lay person I never appreciated a doctor's training and the emotional ups and downs dealing with death. |
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