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Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Stories

By Vincent Lam

(17)

| Paperback | 9780385661447

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Book Description

With their scalpel-sharp prose and unflinching gaze, the stories in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures introduce a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction.

In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam holds in delicate and skillful tension black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic and matter-of-fact portrait of today’s medical profession.

He brings to vivid and convincing life the disparate but interdependent worlds of school and home, heartbreaking young love and life-altering fear in stories that introduce us to Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri, young medical school students and doctors in Toronto.

In “How To Get Into Medical School,” the impulsive Fitz and the ultra-rational Ming explore the possibilities of a relationship that is tested, first by the vigilance of a disapproving family and then by the extraordinary commitment demanded of medical students. In “Take All of Murphy,” three students face the challenge of their first dissection of a corpse — and the unusual quandary of deciding whether following the anatomy textbook or keeping a tattoo intact is more important. And in “A Long Migration,” perhaps the most lyrical of the stories, we see beyond Chen’s immediate world into the past of his family, and in particular that of his grandfather. Once a high-living and flamboyant member of the Chinese expatriate community in Saigon before the Vietnam War, now Percival Chen is dying in a Brisbane retirement home, and his grandson’s modern medical recommendations must make way for older potions that arrive for Percival from an older world.

Riveting and precise, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the specificities of the lives of doctors and their patients and brings us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is an astonishing literary debut, a collection of mature and intricate stories connected through the relationships that develop among a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of med school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evac missions, and terrifying new viruses.

From the Hardcover edition.

Critics

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures / By Vincent Lam

Doubleday Canada, 353 pp, $29.95, hardcover. Was it Margaret Laurence who owned this joke? She's at a 1960s cocktail party-bosomy and likely bombed-and a surgeon chitchats that he plans to write a novel when he finally retires from medicine. "Yes, an ... (read full critics)

straight published on Mon, 30 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

The book is a collection of inter-related short stories revolving around the lives of 4 young doctors. The stories give the humanity side in the medical world. Each story reveals a bit more about the characters, and portrays some of the cases a doctor might have to work on.
I enjoyed reading ... (continue)

The book is a collection of inter-related short stories revolving around the lives of 4 young doctors. The stories give the humanity side in the medical world. Each story reveals a bit more about the characters, and portrays some of the cases a doctor might have to work on.
I enjoyed reading this book very much!

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Tiny said on Aug 20, 2007 | Add your feedback

It's pretty good, for the most part pretty well written, but I feel a bit ripped off by it. It's sort of a collection of stories, but they're about the same group of people, a group of doctors as they go from pre-med to doctors to wherever they end up, so you keep coming back to certain people. But ... (continue)

It's pretty good, for the most part pretty well written, but I feel a bit ripped off by it. It's sort of a collection of stories, but they're about the same group of people, a group of doctors as they go from pre-med to doctors to wherever they end up, so you keep coming back to certain people. But I feel a bit ripped off because you only get glimpses of each one and I'd rather have just had one story, instead of snippets of several. And also I'm a little tired of the -here are several people and here are their stories and here are how they connect- thing.
And I feel a bit ripped off because Vincent Lam is more properly known as Dr. Vincent Lam, and congratulations to him for being both a doctor and now an accomplished, award-winning author, but unlike the Scotiabank Giller Prize jury I don't feel so much like this is a glimpse into the metaphoric but really and truly just a story about doctors and what they do. Maybe I didn't read closely enough - I am bad for that. Maybe there's a whole other -something- I could have gotten from this book if I hadn't read it like I'd watch a medical drama on tv, just wondering what'll happen next. I guess I'll have to read it again in 2 or 3 years to see about that.

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Hold Your Spin said on Jan 22, 2007 | Add your feedback