The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine

by Frank Huyler

Overview

Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician's encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare and elegant stories, Dr. Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine where small moments—the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter—interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured.

The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors—a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seeking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a literary work that emerges from one of the most dramatic specialties of modern medicine. This deeply affecting first book has been described by one early reader as "the best doctor collection I have seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520950726
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/02/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	163
Lexile:	810L (what's this?)
File size:	935 KB

About the Author

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his poetry has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, and Poetry, among others.

Read an Excerpt

:

Odds whisper around us, wheels turn, molecules whir like bobbins. And then, maybe once or twice in our whole lives, events conspire, statistics align with the force of diamonds against us, and they knock us out, there is no chance, the wind blows through us, we're gone. Sometimes we come back. It's magic and real. Those we love walk in, they sit down at the side of the bed. They hold our hands, they look into our eyes and weep, which is what the body does.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
THE UNKNOWN ASSAILANT, 1,
PRELUDE, 9,
THROUGH THE DARK, SOFTLY, 13,
FAITH, 19,
BLACK BAG, 23,
A GOOD SCAR, 31,
THE ENGINEER IN THE DESERT, 33,
THE INVITATION, 37,
SUNDAY MORNING, 41,
THE SHORT ARM OF CHROMOSOME 4, 45,
NEEDLE, 49,
THE DEAD LAKE, 53,
THE PRISONER, 63,
NUMBERS AND VOICES, 67,
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION, 73,
THE BLEEDING GIRL, 79,
I'M DRIVING, 85,
BURN, 93,
THE SECRET, 99,
SPEAKING IN TONGUES, 103,
POWER, 113,
JAW, 115,
THE VIRGIN, 121,
SUGAR, 127,
LIAR, 133,
THE BEE STING, 139,
THE HOUSE IN THE WILDERNESS, 147,
TIME, 151,

Editorial Reviews

[O]h, the ability Huyler has to present the essence of common medical experience in transcendent, poetic prose, the stuff of the permanent memories of every doctor. Nonphysician readers will also appreciate the stories in their reality and their succinct and beautiful expression.

Journal of the American Medical Association

Many of these 'episodes' are moving. All of them are shocking...Huyler is a fine writer with an unerring eye for the dramatic metaphor.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Huyler's perfectly titled collection of ultra-brief stories, The Blood of Strangers, has the force of literature because he does not ignore either medicine's rewards or its price. Without sentimentality or melodrama, Huyler, an emergency department physician and poet, spares us the moralistic exhortation to "treat the person behind the patient" (Who is this person, and what is he or she doing there behind the patient anyway?), the frantic heroics, and the gratuitous exclamation marks. These spare stories transmit emotions as if from a distance, but with a tender fidelity. With Huyler's light touch, the muting of a doctor's feelings and the coarsening of his spirit -- which might have been rendered as callousness or indifference by a heavier hand -- come off more gently, as a form of modesty, as a kind of phlegmatic wisdom, as an acceptance of limits.

New England Journal of Medicine

[Huyler] writes so beautifully, in that humble, simple way that is very affecting. It's very compassionate, filled with detail and just splendid, lucid sentences.

Entertainment Weekly

This haunting, exquisitely observed collection of medical vignettes is much more than a compilation of odd cases from the emergency room. Huyler probes beneath the surface to reveal the marrow of his encounters with patients, such as when, after making a swift diagnosis and saving a life, he later looks in on the patient and pauses to sit "in the dark for a while, watching the red and blue lights of the monitor, savoring him, taking something for myself." Inviting the reader behind the drape, he recounts his personal journey from his first days as a medical student in gross anatomy lab through the harder, lonelier days of his internship and residency before he finally stepped into the coveted role of attending physician, vested with full authority. With a poet's economy, Huyler dismantles the myth of the privileged doctor's life, revealing the long hours and loneliness that are too often requisites for the job. His character studies of the often quirky, sometimes tragic colleagues and patients who pass through the ward are quite poignant--from the murderer whose beating heart Huyler holds in his hands during a life-saving surgical procedure to the head of the trauma service who "looked remarkably like Lee Harvey Oswald" and seduced scads of nurses until one very efficiently took her revenge. Though this slim collection ends just as one has settled into it, it marks Huyler as a writer to watch. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Emergency physician Huyler is also a published poet, which may explain why he offers this account of emergency medicine in 28 focused vignettes. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Meditations on the human condition: an unusual series of quiet, concentrated stories from an emergency-room physician.

Kirkus Reviews

"The author of these doctor stories is an E.R. physician as well as a poet, and his work shows the economy and sharp attention that both jobs demand."

New Yorker

"The Blood of Strangers is a truly important work of medical literature. . . . This is a book likely to develop self reflection and empathy in the medical reader." 

Medical Humanities

""Observant and sympathetic, Huyler is a vivid writer . . . each flash of memory is gripping."

New Scientist

"The Blood of Strangers is a work of art, an utter pleasure to read and reread, and a good example of how transcendent medical stories can be in the right hands. In a series of short, linked pieces that span his career from medical student to young emergency room attending, Huyler recreates the connected worlds of emergency room, operating room, and intensive care unit accurately and—no small trick—without a shred of sentimentality. . . . If anyone is likely to succeed in capturing the entire tragicomedy of modern medicine in prose for posterity, he [Huyler] is the guy."

Hastings Center Report

"The stories illustrate Huyler's understanding of medicine and psychology as aids to humanity, not means to a physician's self-glorification."

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