Short Story Collections (Single Author), Canadian Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction, Occupations - Fiction

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Name: Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures
Author: Lam, Vincent
ISBN: 9780007263813

by Lam, Vincent

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Overview

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures welcomes readers into a world where the most mundane events can quickly become life or death. By following four young medical students and physicians – Ming, Fitz, Sri and Chen – this debut collection from 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam is a riveting, eye-opening account of what it means to be a doctor. Deftly navigating his way through 12 interwoven short stories, the author explores the characters’ relationships with each other, their patients, and their careers. Lam draws on his own experience as an emergency room physician and shares an insider’s perspective on the fears, frustrations, and responsibilities linked with one of society’s most highly regarded occupations.

“I wanted to write about the way in which a person changes as they become a physician — how their world view shifts, and how they become a slightly different version of themselves in the process of becoming a doctor,” Lam explains. “I wanted to write about the reality that doing good and trying to help others is not simple. It is ethically complicated and sometimes involves a reality that can only be expressed by telling a story.”

In the book’s first story, “How to Get into Medical School, Part 1,” students Ming and Fitz wrestle with their opposing personalities and study techniques, while coming to terms with a growing emotional connection that elicits disapproval from Ming’s traditional Chinese-Canadian parents. Lam’s exceptional talent for describing scenarios with great precision is showcased in “Take All of Murphy,” when Ming, Chen, and Sri find themselves at a moral crossroads while dissecting a cadaver. Throughout the book, readers are treated to the physicians’ internal thoughts and the mental drama involved with treating patients, including Fitz’s struggle with self-doubt in “Code Clock” and Chen’s boredom and exhaustion in “Before Light.”

From delivering babies to evacuating patients and dealing with deadly viruses, the four primary characters in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures are made thoroughly human by Lam’s insightful detail, realistic dialogue, and expert storytelling. The medical world is naturally filled with drama, but it’s the author’s ability to give equal weight to the smaller moments that really brings this book to life.

About the Author, Lam, Vincent

Vincent Lam was born in 1974 in London, Ont., into a family from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. Four years later, they moved to Ottawa where he was raised on stories told by his father and the works of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and developed aspirations to become a writer. Acknowledging that he hadn’t seen enough of the world to create great literary works, Lam enrolled in medical school at the University of Toronto, hoping it would provide real-life experience and a wealth of rich material. His plan proved to be a very good one.

It was while working as a doctor aboard an Arctic cruise that Lam had a chance encounter with renowned author Margaret Atwood. She agreed to read his short stories, and later sent him an email announcing “Congratulations. You can write.” Atwood mentored the young author, and was instrumental in bringing Lam to his publisher, Doubleday Canada.

While crafting his debut collection of short stories, Lam worked in the emergency room at Toronto East General Hospital and helped fight the 2003 SARS outbreak. “An emergency physician is often in the centre of a storm of tensions and drama,” he says. “We work in a world that is both medical and personal, where the stakes are high and events are unpredictable. As a doctor, I respond to the world around me, and act within that world. As a writer, I do something fresh and new on the page.”

Lam’s depiction of four medical students who become doctors in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures was so unique and accomplished that the collection won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize – Canada’s most prestigious literary award. He is the youngest writer, and the only first-time author, to win it.

Next up is Lam’s first novel, Cholon, Near Forgotten, which follows a Chinese man in Saigon, headmaster of an English school as well as a compulsive gambler, during the Vietnam War. Shaftesbury Films is currently developing Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures into a TV drama series for The Movie Network and Lam will act as a consultant while continuing to work as an emergency physician in Toronto, where he lives with his wife and son.

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Editorials

Christine Montross

In this collection, Lam deftly illuminates the line physician and patient must walk together—hope and health on one side, cynicism and sickness on the other. We see in cold light what is at risk when the balance slips too far in either direction. In the end, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures asks how much of death's burden should rest on the shoulders of those we ask to fight against it.
—The Washington Post

Evan Hughes

Lam is better when he emphasizes the inherent strength of his material. He is himself an emergency physician and thus brings to mind Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams and Chekhov—the first a former medical student and the others doctors for the whole of their literary careers. But Lam's work fits better among that of nonfiction writers like Jerome Groopman, Sherwin Nuland and Atul Gawande. He writes what is sometimes called "documentary fiction," providing an insider's view of his field, replete with the stark juxtapositions—notably the privilege of the treater with the powerlessness of the treated—and the moral hazards that characterize the profession. Some of the best stories in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures read like journalistic dispatches from the medical front lines, with careful psychological characterization added. As such, Lam's book represents a promising demonstration of fiction's unique power: to bring the news that stays news, in Ezra Pound's formulation, and to allow the reader to see through the eyes of those who experience events firsthand.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Lam's Giller Prize-winning debut, a veritable cornucopia of interesting characters, voices and effects, presents a formidable burden for a single reader. Through the four main sleep-deprived characters, we wind our way through med school and beyond. Lane sculpts a precise and colorful aural identity for every character, regardless of their significance. A master of capturing nuances in vocal personality, he ranges from a strong, stiff Chinese-American accent to a lisping, muttering paranoid schizophrenic in a heartbeat, and nothing seems forced. At one point, a doctor speaking to a patient in "German-accented Hindi influenced English he learned in Bombay" seems like an narrator's bar bet or a challenge from the author. But Lane pulls it off perfectly, with grace and pluck. Occasionally, Lane's conjuring is amped up with unnecessary special effects (a hollow distortion when dialogue is heard over the phone) that would be distracting if both the author and the reader were anything less than solid and riveting. The combination of Lane and Lam is a winning one, a performance not to be missed. Simultaneous release with the Weinstein Books hardcover (Reviews, June 25). (Sept.)

Library Journal

This collection of linked stories revolves around four young multicultural Canadian medical students-Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri-as they attempt to balance their lives with the taxing demands of classes and residency in a highly charged emergency room. They deal with patients' ailments, from hiccups to a fatal heart attack in a massage parlor; in this case, the doctor, when talking with the family, has to find a "balance of professing humanity without invading privacy." Some stories ramble along with little action-one features the romance between Fitz and Ming, their breakup, and her eventual marriage to Doctor Chen-but most are action packed and insightful, including a psychological thriller about a patient who believes he has been poisoned by the neighbor who's secretly in love with him and another tale about an outbreak of SARS in the hospital that forces Fitz and Chen to come to terms with the possibility of their own deaths. Written in a straightforward manner and including a helpful glossary of medical terms, this is a good addition to every fiction collection.
—David A. Berona

Kirkus Reviews

A searing, perfectly paced set of linked stories that explores the careers and relationships of four Toronto doctors. Ming, Chen, Fitzgerald and Sri are young physicians whose lives intertwine both casually and intimately as they navigate the painstaking (and often painful) road to becoming physicians. We first meet Ming and Fitzgerald in Ottawa as they are studying for their pre-med exams and cautiously entering a relationship doomed by Ming's career-obsessed immigrant parents, the ghosts of abuse by her older cousin and, above all, the knowledge that Ming will be accepted to medical school and Fitzgerald will not. He does follow her, eventually, but not before she has linked herself with a more appropriate boyfriend, her lab partner, Chen. The tension between the characters pales, though, when they graduate and begin their careers. Each must face situations that test their abilities, their integrity and their strength. A paranoid mental patient, for example, who is obsessed with his neighbor and also convinced that she is trying to poison him, causes Sri to momentarily doubt his own sanity. And Fitzgerald wonders how to care, both physically and mentally, for a hostile patient brought to the hospital in shackles by unsympathetic police officers. When Sri is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the tables turn on him, and his role as a life-saver ironically becomes futile when he cannot save his own. The stories culminate in a health crisis of a much larger scale, when Fitzgerald contracts the SARS virus from a patient, and then passes it to Chen, who examines him. The two wait in quarantine, once romantic rivals, now reliant on one another, and suddenly their profession seems to be at oncepointless and more important than ever. Tender insight into the fascinating emotional and social implications of a career that is, inherently, so much more than a job. Agent: Anne McDermid/Anne McDermid and Associates Ltd.