vincent lam bloodletting and miraculous cures

One of the most gripping stories, “Eli”, exposes the dangers that doctors and staff face in the E.R. And there are no miraculous cures, as the title suggests. Death is what is really the matter in Bloodletting and Lam tackles his theme with literary fortitude. In these “fish bowls”, they can communicate by telephone and discuss their own likely deaths with clinical coolness.

Chen, who married Fitzgerald’s first love, Ming, an obstetrical surgeon, is in the next isolation room. This reversal of fate causes Fitzgerald to reflect deeply about who he really is and what that “dark-cloaked word”, doctor, really means. In “Contact Tracing” which is set at the time of the SARS outbreak in a Toronto hospital in March 2003, the young doctors, Fitzgerald and Chen, are patients. They are young ambitious Toronto medical students who graduate and practice medicine in their respective specialties, their hectic lives intertwined with each other, their families, and various patients.Īlthough Lam, a Canadian of Chinese Vietnamese descent, claims in this same interview that the stories aren’t autobiographical, they do reveal a lot about the underside of the medical profession and the human fallibility of its practitioners. These twelve stories are linked by four recurring characters: Dr. Lam, a thirty-one-year-old emergency room physician in a Toronto hospital, has certainly put his heretofore untapped creativity to goo use in this complex and insightful first book of short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. In a recent interview published in The National Review of Medicine, Vincent Lam candidly admits that he always wanted to be a writer “since he was a kid”, and that he became a doctor more to please his mother.

Vincent lam bloodletting and miraculous cures