Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, Holt's writing evokes Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams. Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human. Terrence Holt, whose In the Valley of the Kings was hailed as a 'work of genius' (New York Times) and made Amazon's Top Ten Short Story Collections of the year, brings a writer's eye to his experiences as a first-year graduate doctor. Intense, ironic, heartfelt, and heartbreaking, these nine vivid episodes take us to the bedside of a patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, through a nightmarish struggle to convince a man that he has cancer, to a life-and-death effort to keep an oxygen mask on a claustrophobic patient, and into the lounge of a snowbound hospital where doctors swap yarns through the night. Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, Holt's writing evokes Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams.Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human. 'Terrence Holt writes with unflinching honesty about all the fears, joys and brutalities of a junior doctor's work.' Karen Hitchcock 'In its undaunted vision of our plight and promise as a fallen race, its intricate rhythms of tenderness and pain, the torque of its knowing, Internal Medicine is an uncommon, lovely work of art.' William Giraldi