KIRKUS REVIEW – View Here

In this engrossing memoir, a thoughtful physician battles baffling ailments—including a strange new malady called AIDS.

Jordan, a prominent infectious disease specialist, looks back on his first 20 years of teaching, research and clinical practice in the fast-changing medical universe of the 1960s to the 1980s. He’s an internist whose primary mission is the intellectual task of finding the correct diagnosis; he both disdains and envies “procedural” specialists, the gastroenterology types who grow rich performing routine colonoscopies.

He centers much of his narrative on case studies that he approaches with the inquisitive cunning of a detective. These medical mysteries, which read like episodes of House without the snarky attitude, run the gamut: searching for the source of a restaurant outbreak of salmonella, figuring out what triggers a woman’s repeated herpes eruptions, playing a hunch that a patient’s apparently classic leukemia is really tuberculosis, struggling to understand the opportunistic infections that erupt in immunocompromised AIDS patients, etc.

Jordan’s lucid, evocative prose—sometimes, as with the rupture of a pus-filled eyeball, almost too evocative—conveys both the complexity of medical issues and the life-and-death drama that hinges on them. He also gives readers a revealing insider’s view of the culture of medicine, showing the brutal, sleep-deprived grind of a student’s internship and residency, warm mentor–student relationships, tense personality clashes between doctors, hair-raising encounters with difficult and downright delusional patients, and the multifaceted strains of underpaid, overworked academic medicine.

At one point, he feels so overwhelmed that he takes to reading Sylvia Plath. Jordan weaves into his anecdotes pointed commentary on the state of modern health care and its bottom-line orientation; he’s especially outspoken on the topics of physician incompetence and “sleazy medicine by money-hungry doctors” ringing up fees for unnecessary treatments. But there’s a philosophical depth to his writing as well, a plangent recognition of the importance of humility in the face of the often unknowable sickness.

White-knuckle medical adventures paired with revealing, expert insights.

Review by Sylvam at www.barnesandnoble.com   5 Stars

Lots of doctors become writers, some of them good ones, telling us about their experience practicing medicine. This book is unique because of its intimate and heartfelt tone, which may have to do with the fact that the author did not come from privilege as so many doctors do. You find this out in the first chapter which seems like a baseball story, but it’s really about mentorship, a central theme in the book. No arms-length standoffish doctor here. This guy suffers, weeps, and bleeds in the trenches, partly reflecting the intensity of his practice in infectious diseases where you either make the right diagnosis or you’re lost as shown in chapters called “Pus Was On His Mind” and “Hectic Fevers where what seems to be an infection turns out to be an auto-immune disease. The writing is unusually true, spare, and unadorned. The downside may be that many readers don’t want to know how hard it is to practice medicine right and why. Now there’s a scary thought! As the author says in the last sentence of the Prologue, “the reader may never see his or her doctor in quite the same way again.”