{"id":31,"date":"2014-12-24T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/?page_id=31"},"modified":"2015-01-14T09:08:42","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T09:08:42","slug":"reviews","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

KIRKUS REVIEW – View Here<\/a><\/p>\n

In this engrossing memoir, a thoughtful physician battles baffling ailments\u2014including a strange new malady called AIDS.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s an internist whose primary mission is the intellectual task of finding the correct diagnosis; he both disdains and envies \u201cprocedural\u201d specialists, the gastroenterology types who grow rich performing routine colonoscopies.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s repeated herpes eruptions, playing a hunch that a patient\u2019s apparently classic leukemia is really tuberculosis, struggling to understand the opportunistic infections that erupt in immunocompromised AIDS patients, etc.<\/p>\n

Jordan\u2019s lucid, evocative prose\u2014sometimes, as with the rupture of a pus-filled eyeball, almost too evocative\u2014conveys both the complexity of medical issues and the life-and-death drama that hinges on them. He also gives readers a revealing insider\u2019s view of the culture of medicine, showing the brutal, sleep-deprived grind of a student\u2019s internship and residency, warm mentor\u2013student relationships, tense personality clashes between doctors, hair-raising encounters with difficult and downright delusional patients, and the multifaceted strains of underpaid, overworked academic medicine.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s especially outspoken on the topics of physician incompetence and \u201csleazy medicine by money-hungry doctors\u201d ringing up fees for unnecessary treatments. But there\u2019s a philosophical depth to his writing as well, a plangent recognition of the importance of humility in the face of the often unknowable sickness.<\/p>\n

White-knuckle medical adventures paired with revealing, expert insights.<\/p>\n

Review by Sylvam at www.barnesandnoble.com<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 5 Stars<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019re lost as shown in chapters called \u201cPus Was On His Mind\u201d and \u201cHectic 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\u2019t want to know how hard it is to practice medicine right and why. Now there\u2019s a scary thought! As the author says in the last sentence of the Prologue, \u201cthe reader may never see his or her doctor in quite the same way again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KIRKUS REVIEW – View Here In this engrossing memoir, a thoughtful physician battles baffling ailments\u2014including 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\u2019s an internist whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-31","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbprabooks.com\/mcolinjordan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}