Synopses & Reviews
Terrence Holt, whose was hailed as a "work of genius" (), brings a writer's eye and a doctor's touch to this powerful account of residency. Intense, ironic, heartfelt, and heartbreaking, these nine vivid stories put us at the bedside of a patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, through a nightmarish struggle to convince a man that he has cancer, at a life-and-death effort to keep an oxygen mask on a claustrophobic patient, and in the lounge of a snowbound hospital where doctors swap yarns through the night. Out of these "dioramas from the Museum of Human Misery," Holt draws meaning, beauty, wonder, and truth. Personal, poignant, and meticulously precise, these stories evoke Chekhov, Maugham, and William Carlos Williams, admitting readers to the beating heart of medicine. is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.
Review
"Each exquisitely crafted and evocative tale reveals not only the power of Holt's storytelling, but the stark realization that for doctors and patient alike, it's our bodies that 'remain the essential mystery we keep trying to solve.'" New York Times Book Review
Review
"Where do the brutal limitations of our mortal selves meet the grace of kindness? Where do simple observations of the progress of lives become a spare human poetry? Perhaps nowhere more so than in the practice of medicine, and in the finest of writing. These are the remarkable occurrences that fill and enrich Terrence Holt's elegant and heart-rending memoir." Publishers Weekly, starred Review
Review
"In Terrence Holt has written a guided tour of a very particular hell, the 'Inferno' of medical training. This is a trenchant and devastating book but, miraculously, not a dispiriting one. Holt's beleaguered resident makes us gaze with him into abysses of every sort of physical, emotional, and spiritual pain, and yet what we feel with him, at the end of every story, is a resilient, exalting love of the world and the people doomed to suffer in it." Dr. Vincent Lam, author of The Headmaster's Wager
Review
"In its undaunted vision of our plight and promise as a fallen race, its intricate rhythms of tenderness and pain, the torque of its knowing, is an uncommon, lovely work of art. I feel myself expanded and enlarged by it. Holt's integrity and intelligence are gifts that alter how we view the wreckage and wonder of our lives." Chris Adrian, author of The Children's Hospital
Review
"[T]his book illuminates human fragility in tales both lyrical and soul-wrenching.... Holt dissects the medical experience in exquisite and restrained prose." Danielle Ofri
Review
"Whether or not you classify this collection of nine stories as nonfiction, they ring true in both details and spirit, starting with a doctor's evolution from the first night on call as an intern and ending with ethical questions that a physician ponders 40 months later, his residency complete... Dr. Holt never settles for easy answers, and the questions he poses--reflecting the frequent uncertainties of doctors and patients alike--will leave readers thinking long after the final page is turned." William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
Review
"Holt, who also holds a master's in fiction writing and a PhD in literature, is an excellent story teller... [T]he portrait Holt offers is artful, unfailingly human, and understandable." Alice Cary BookPage
Review
"Holt's new collection of stories, captures the feelings of a young doctor's three-year hospital residency--the powerlessness, the exhaustion, the chaotic and seemingly endless shifts, and above all, the intensity of being with people in moments of extremity--better than anything else I have ever read... Holt's unadorned prose and pitch-perfect dialogue contribute to the realism of these stories. At times they have the atmosphere of a hospital version of film noir, the narrator sounding as tough as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in his effort to be efficient and unflappable... Anyone who's considering becoming a doctor, or anyone who wants to know what's at the core of a doctor's initiation, should read this book." Dennis Rosen Boston Globe
Synopsis
Holt's debut collection of short stories, In the Valley of the Kings, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as one of "those works of genius" that "will endure for as long as our hurt kind remains to require their truth." Now he returns with Internal Medicine a work based on his own experiences as a physician offering an insider's access to the long night of the hospital, where the intricacies of medical technology confront the mysteries of the human spirit.
"A Sign of Weakness" takes us through a grueling nightlong vigil at the bedside of a dying woman. In her "small whimpering noises, rhythmic, paced almost to the beating of my heart," a doctor confronts his own helplessness, clinging "like a child to the thought of morning." In the unforgettable "Giving Bad News," we struggle with a man who maddeningly, terrifyingly refuses to remember his terminal diagnosis, forcing us to tell him, again and again, what we never should have wanted to tell him at all.
At the bedside of a hospice patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, in "The Surgical Mask," we reach the limits of what we are able to face in human suffering, in our own horror at what happens to our bodies as they die.
In the psychiatric hospital of "Iron Maiden," a routine chest X-ray opens a window onto a nightmare vision of medieval torture and a recognition of how our mortality drives all of us to madness.
In these four stories, and five others, Internal Medicine captures the doctor's struggle not only with sickness, suffering, and death but the fears and frailties each of us patient and doctor alike brings to the bedside. In a powerful alchemy of insight and compassion, Holt reveals how those vulnerabilities are the foundations of caring. Intensely realized, gently ironic, heartfelt and heartbreaking, Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.
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Synopsis
A Best Book of 2014 "[Terrence Holt] is Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious."--Junot Díaz
Synopsis
Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives," finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.
About the Author
Terrence Holt taught literature and writing at Rutgers University and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. Many of these stories have appeared in different forms in literary journals and prize anthologies, including the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope, Bookforum, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. A contributing editor for Men's Health, Holt teaches and practices medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.