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A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
Knopf
January 2007
On Sale: January 9, 2007
288 pages
ISBN: 0307263533
EAN: 9780307263537
Hardcover
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Fiction
A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity
and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing
questions of medicine and the human condition. When Pauline Chen began medical school twenty years ago, she
dreamed of saving lives. What she did not count on was how
much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately,
Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound
paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill
also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows
Chen over the course of her education, training, and
practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the
problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons
of her training with her innate knowledge of shared
humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her
fierce desire to cure. From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to
the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from
the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the
emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient
dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a
dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured
death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship
with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its
pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which
her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what
she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her
patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself
as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and
beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the
ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant
questioning of how we should live. Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical
expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a
piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world
that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb
addition to the best medical literature of our time.
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