Special Collections Featured Book for September

This Won’t Hurt a Bit: My Education in Medicine and Motherhood (and other white lies)

By Michelle Au

Medical Humanities/3^rd floor Special Collections
WZ 100 A8875w 2011

 “This is a no-holds-barred account of what a modern medical education feels like, from the grim to the ridiculous, from the heartwarming to the obscene.  Unlike most medical memoirs, however, this one details the author’s struggles to maintain a life outside of the hospital, in the small amount of free time she had to live it.  And, after she and her husband have a baby early in both their medical residencies, Au explores the demands of being a parent and compares them with those of a physician, two all-consuming jobs in which the lives of others are very literally in her hands…….”

 

Special Collections Featured Book for January

Sixty Years on a Cutting Edge: University of Colorado, Department of Surgery, 1950-2010 by Bruce C. Paton, MD

HSL History of Medicine /3rd Floor Special Collections

W 19 P312s 2010

“Over the past sixty years there have been many medical innovations at the University of Colorado, School of Medicine.  From the development of the heart lung machine; the first successful double lung transplant on a cystic fibrosis patient in Colorado; the first pancreatic transplant in Colorado to cure diabetes; the first living-related liver transplant in Colorado and one of the first living-donor liver transplants in the country.  The department used the first grooved needle invented by a University nurse, and was the first to use GORE-TEX as a vascular graft, to name a few.  Not only will those in the medical field find this book of interest, but those outside of the medical field will find Dr. Paton’s style enjoyable to read.”

Special Collections Featured Book for November

The blue notebook : a novel by James Levine

HSL Medical Humanities/3rd Floor Special Collections

WZ 350 L665b 2010

Author James Levine, a Mayo Clinic physician, was intrigued when he observed one of Mumbai’s child prostitutes writing in a notebook.  Inspired, Levine writes a tragic and brutal portrayal of Batuk, a child forced into sex work at age 9.  Through a twist of fate, Batuk learns to read and write while hospitalized for tuberculosis treatment as a young girl and we learn of her life through her own journal.  A strange mix of girlish denial (she “makes sweet cakes” – her synonym for servicing customers) and worldliness (she manipulates an admirer for a pencil), provides resilience, and she survives the nightmare of the “Street of Cages.”  Her literacy separates her from others in her sphere, but the hope of escape from poverty and exploitation is overshadowed by the health risks and danger of her work.  Health professionals reading this work cannot miss the subtle signs of her ultimate fate.

[Lynne Fox, Education Librarian]