Do you ever wonder what doctors talk about while they are performing surgeries? Are you curious what your healthcare provider had to learn to become your doctor, or what kind of atrocities they’ve seen and treated throughout their career? Would your opinion about the healthcare you receive change if you considered how your doctor felt delivering that care to you? Anna DeForest’s A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS is a one-of-a-kind novel that explores the humanity and perspective of our medical doctors and addresses some of these questions through the voice of an unnamed female medical student as she recalls vignettes from various rotations of her early residency.
First and foremost, a fair warning – A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS is not for the faint of spirit. This is not a light and easy read, and may be difficult to digest as it can be quite graphic, detached, acerbic, and bleakly raw. The novel does not end with the note of hope, optimism, or even closure that some may be looking for.
Yes, the female medical student telling us her story is frank, unflinching. She can be perceived as resigned and jaded; however, she is incredibly trusting to let us in on her most intimate thoughts and feelings. DeForest’s strength is in crafting the novel to read like a secret peek into someone else’s diary – it is easy to forget that this is not a memoir or a true story. Long after you finish reading, you will be itching to understand whether DeForest drew from and integrated real experiences into the story, and what her inspiration was to weave this tale together. (If so, make sure to follow DeForest on Twitter, as this is where she is highlighting upcoming events.) This peek behind the curtain into the provider’s perspective serves to remind readers that doctors are people that are wrestling with their own unnamed emotional struggles, and go home to their own day-to-day minutiae, too.
A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS explores the intersection of poverty, faith, and the process of managing the mechanics of the body that we call healthcare. If you are looking for an unequivocally thought-provoking read that makes you ask questions instead of simply spoon feeding you the answers, put this novel on your to-read list.
A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian.
In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.
In brilliant, wry, and biting prose, A History of Present Illness is a boldly honest meditation on the body, the hope of healing in the face of total loss, and what it means to be alive.
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