The well-known CNN medical reporter and Atlanta nerosurgeon turned novelist, creates a fictional Monday morning closed Morbiity and Mortality conference in which doctors review their mistakes. They are merciless and cruel, with extremely unrealistic characters, and sometimes career -destroying revelations. I have attended many Morbidity and Mortality Rounds and usually the audience is very sympathetic to the doctor who goofed up, thinking that it could have been him or her. I know of no hospital with 60 academic surgeons on staff, nor have I ever heard of someone bleeding to death while undergoing a craniotomy. No hospital would allow someone except in the direst circumstances to go to the O.R. without a history and preoperative laboratory tests, especially not an asymptomatic youth. And all of this takes place in the first 40 pages. It is even more bizarre that the story is said to take place in Chelsea Michigan, a town I have visited, with a population of under 6000, but with a world famous hospital covering six blocks. Some poetic licence!
A surgery resident is able to diagnose pulmonary embolism that had mystified internists, not with a lung scan but with a spiral CT. In Chapter 25, the author’s lies about internists become explicit when he belittles them by claiming that they, unlike surgeons, “Rarely did they cure anyone.” A star neurosurgeon after brain trauma becomes “50 percent of what she once was” but apparently is able to function as a family doctor, including delivering babies.
In Chapter 18, it becomes clear that neither the emergency room doctors at Chelsea General nor the author have any idea what is involved in organ donation, a surprising deficit for a practising neurosurgeon. A heavily tattooed killer is considered for organ donation whereas his elderly victim is not, but is sent right to the morgue. (No one is too old to be a liver donor.)
This is not the only book trumpeting the mythical unique skills of neurosurgeons at the expense of other specialists, witness Gray Matters by Theodore Schwartz, and Sam Kean’s The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. Then there is the Netflix film series based on this book that I have not and will not watch.
Lest I be perceived as just a jealous internist envious of the praise and awe neurosurgeons get from the public from such writing, I should acknowledge that the author has an engaging writing style and a very vivid imagination.
My advice to Dr. Gupta: “Stick to neurosurgery, give up unrealistically overdramatizing it and stop belittling internal medicine specialists and praising surgeons.”
2/5.
Thanks, Carol
The Passionate Reader 