Vincent Lam crafts insightful Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
Steven Hayward, Cleveland Plain Dealer
September 16, 2007
few years ago, Margaret Atwood was vacationing on the Akademic Ioffe, a Russian scientific vessel that cruises the Arctic, and Vincent Lam was the ship doctor. He approached her and confessed his literary pretensions; she agreed to take a look at his work, offered some pointers and eventually passed the manuscript on to her Canadian publisher.
Then, in the spring of 2006, a grinning Atwood completed the fairy tale by presenting Lam with the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious award for fiction. Now, at long last, the book with this startling pedigree has made its way to America.
The stories in "Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures" are, without exception, about the medical profession and, specifically, the experience of being initiated into it. If you've ever Tivo'd "Grey's Anatomy," if your idea of a good story is one beginning with the sweaty desperation of a patient being wheeled into the emergency room, if you like the sound of young interns shouting "Bolus Amio 300. Pads, and get ready to shock" -- this book is for you.
The stories, arranged chronologically, feature the same cast of characters, medical students becoming residents. There is Ming, whose narrowly analytic approach is sometimes a liability; the overly affective Sri; the detached Chen; and also Fitzgerald, who struggles with his studies and develops a drinking problem.
Lam's specialty lies in crafting situations that force his characters to stop doing or thinking a particular thing. In "Winston," Sri reminds himself that medical students "are taught to speak in the mood they wish the patient to absorb;" in a later story, "An Insistent Tide," we see Ming break out of his reserve to climb onto a bed with a laboring mother and go to extraordinary lengths to save her baby.
Herein lies the distance between Lam's writing and some crappy television show. There is no mugging for the camera in "Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures." The book reads like inside information, as if Lam is telling us what other doctors wish he wouldn't.
The struggling medical student is a convention we all know, but Lam makes us realize why doctors in such dramas are so frequently young: Their youth accentuates the dynamism and instability of the profession itself, a seductive and risky venture full of great expectations and lost illusions.
"Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability," Lam quotes Sir William Osler before he begins. In the pages that follow, we see both art and science.
© Cleveland Plain Dealer 2007