Graceful tales of medicine, told with careMoira Macdonald, Seattle Times
Lam's writing is both minimalist and elegant, like a taut line of stitches perfectly placed. The book's dozen interwoven stories feature four main characters: Fitz, Ming, Chen and Sri, all known primarily by their last names. They go through medical school together, learn to work with cadavers (theirs is christened Murphy, "a dignified but comfortable name"), listen to emergency-room patients who may or may not be delusional, fall in and out of love with each other and gradually become comfortable with their new identities. "Contact Tracing," the book's most haunting story, takes us inside the SARS epidemic in a Toronto hospital's respiratory isolation unit. A group of nurses participates in a lottery to decide who will take care of the SARS patients, with a union rep efficiently drawing tags from a box. Among those with red tags, "some cried openly, or left the room to do so." Fitz, himself a patient in one of those isolation rooms, ponders his role reversal: a patient, still called doctor. While uncomfortable with the title, he cannot leave it behind; it was, he reflects, "his best and last and only piece of clothing which, despite its flaws, could hardly be discarded."
© Seattle Times 2007
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etting foot in a hospital can be like visiting a foreign country: The language is strange, the customs and dress at times mystifying (is that man in scrubs a doctor, or a janitor?), the pace entirely its own. Canadian physician Vincent Lam, making his fiction debut with the short-story collection "Bloodletting & Mysterious Cures," arrives as a welcome guide. His book, winner of Canada's 2006 Giller Prize for fiction, lets us peek behind those swinging doors at the end of a hospital's echoing hallway; we overhear conversations, gaze at patient charts, let out our breath at the end of a failed resuscitation.