Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures: Vincent Lam
Harper Collins $27.99
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By Nina Cullen
Doctors witness people bursting with the best and the worst of what life has to offer them, a perfect vantage point for musing on the human condition. Vincent Lam can now join the ranks of Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and our own Peter Goldsworthy, all doctors with a penchant for writing good fiction. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is full of fascination for the drama of life and death (with regular domestics thrown in). These short stories loosely link four medical students, from their pre-med exams to the specialties that scatter them throughout Canada and the rest of the world.
Lam covers everything from SARS, emergency caesareans and tattooed cadavers to insistent psych patients, sleep deprived doctors and lonely reactions to unrequited love. His prose slices slowly through the skin, devoid of butcher metaphors. It's direct and dry, and there is no putting your hands up to your eyes and asking "Is it over yet?"
As life and death situations unfold, the expected frenzy of ER/Grey's Anatomy mayhem is flipped to slow-motion and the jumbled jargon frantically yelled across stretchers is scripted for your scrutiny. Shocked three times, tubed, epi times three, atropine times tow. En route - total six shocks. No response. Bolus. Amino three hundred. Emergencies, it seems, are clunky and uncertain, and nowhere near as neat and choreographed as we've been led to believe. The doctors tending to them are also unnervingly human: tired, distracted, ambitious, compromised, disillusioned and dying for a drink.
Some of Lam's best writing is saved for life's less dramatic moments. The calm between these doctors' storms, the drive to work or the flight to South America to pick up sick tourists. The peace of a quiet moment is written so sparely that you too have a moment to breathe before the patients arrive.
If his bedside manner is as good as his turn of phrase, then you'll be in very good hands with Dr Lam.