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The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER
Next in the queue
57
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
38/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Thomas Fisher
Publisher:
One World
Date:
March 22, 2022
The story of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor trying to steer his patients and colleagues through a crushing pandemic and a violent summer, amidst a healthcare system that seems determined to leave them behind how vulnerable Black bodies could be.
What The Reviewers Say
This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong. Fisher’s account of his days is gripping. While reading, we are all, helplessly, medical voyeurs.
Fisher’s deep commitment to these patients is evident. Each story becomes a window on the terrible inability of even his major medical facility to promptly and efficiently provide needed care. The reader may wonder why he doesn’t move on to another big-city hospital. Similar situations exist in all of their ERs, he writes. His intimate accounts of what goes on at Chicago will alarm anyone about the terrible state of America’s emergency medical care.
... one of the year’s best [memoirs], partly because it is the work of a physician describing, with a natural writer’s concision, craft and bluntness, his vulnerabilities. In harrowing ways, it is an account of a Chicago ER doctor not just saying what he would like to say to patients he treats but asking what he wished he had time to ask.
Fisher starkly depicts the emergency department he toils in.
