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.

A captivating blend of memoir and social commentary describing his struggle to serve patients 'in a health care system that is deeply unjust and dangerous'.

Riveting.

The author’s discussions of the initial impact of Covid-19...are the most compelling. But the book, clearly started before the pandemic, is not so much about the effects of the pandemic...but rather the inadequacies of health care for Black citizens in the South Side and other urban areas. In the chapters about particular days in the emergency room, Fisher delivers sharp portraits of individual patients. However, like the doctor who treated them, typically only for a few minutes, we have no idea what happens to them following the visit.