Product Description
A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition.
When Pauline Chen began medical school twenty years ago, she dreamed of saving lives. What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure.
From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.
Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.
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Fascinating--Exquisitely Written--Full of Heartfelt Honesty
"Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality" by Pauline W. Chen is outstanding on many levels. Its purpose is to reveal what is wrong with the medical profession's attitude toward the treatment of terminally ill and dying patients. But don't expect an academic discussion; Chen makes this issue very personal. The book is a recounting of the many experiences in her own medical career--from medical student to transplant surgeon--that shaped and later changed her attitude toward care of patients at the end of life.
I had no particular reason to read this book--I am not a doctor, the parent of a doctor, or involved in any way with the medical profession. I just saw this book on the New Books shelf in my local library and checked it out. What is amazing is that I could not put this book down--I know that sounds so trite, but it's true. What grabbed me first was the wholly unexpected openness and honesty of the author. What grabbed me next was the beautiful clear prose. Here was a brilliant woman doctor telling me all about the many experiences in her medical career that shaped her current convictions about medical care at the end of life. But she was not just telling me about these medical experiences, she was turning herself inside out to reveal how she actually FELT about each experience. How many doctors have you ever heard talk to you about their feelings? This author brought me close to her heart--I felt like a sister or a dear friend.
I came away from this book with a far greater respect for physicians; especially all they have to deal with, physically and mentally, throughout their long years of training and practice. I also come away with a far greater appreciation for the human frailty of physicians, particularly when dealing with-end of-life issues. This is a profession that has to deal with far more than a normally allotted human share of agony, grief, and soul-searching.