123 VERY SHORT STORIES FROM A LONG LIFE IN MEDICINE

Lubin looks back on violent patients, obstreperous colleagues, weird cases, miraculous cures, and inescapable deaths in this searching medical memoir.

The author recollects his 50-year career as a general practitioner and medical professor in Montreal, Vancouver, and rural British Columbia in 123 anecdotes, each running a page or two long. The narrative has plenty of action, including a fight with a hallucinating man experiencing alcohol withdrawal who had to be held down by three Mounties while Lubin sedated him, and a fatal train derailment—he was haunted afterward by his decision not to enter a burning locomotive to check on two workers who were likely already dead. The author describes toxic hospital office politics and power plays; in one confrontation, Lubin, then a medical student, was almost failed for his temerity in recommending a diagnostic test that a senior physician thought unwise (the author was later proved right). Some of the sparkling success stories include a patient who was suicidal over the pain of his rheumatoid arthritis, saved by new treatment that had him out dancing a few months later. And the stories feature some entertaining, oddball happenstances, like the couple who came into the emergency room naked and covered in soot; having sex while stoned out of their minds, they didn’t notice that their apartment was on fire until the firefighters pried them apart. Throughout, Lubin defends the art of medicine—giving special attention to the unsung general practitioner—as a humanistic calling that requires a close bond between doctor and patient. The lucid, straightforward prose renders medical issues in plain English and conveys profound emotion with plangent understatement: “At the end, the kidneys removed, her abdomen was sewn up roughly,” he writes of a young woman who died suddenly of an allergic reaction. “Then, instead of waking her up, I turned off the ventilator, noting the time. Off the ventilator, all respiration ceased. Her heart rate quickened, then slowed, then stopped. Time of death 3:30 p.m.” The result is an illuminating account of sickness and healing.

An engrossing set of case studies, told with clear-eyed detail and deep sympathy.