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Overview
Hundreds of people slam through its doors every day: gun-shot cops, battered kids, drug addicts, and suicides, destitute drunks, homeless people, AIDS sufferers, and accident victims. It's a bizarre parade of humanity looking for help — in the one place they know they can find it.
Welcome to the frontline trenches of medicine: the emergency room of the legendary Bellevue Hospital. Here, an army of doctors and nurses faces the onslaught of young and old, rich and ragged, sick and dying. All day, all night. All year.This is their story — an around-the-clock drama of the unexpected: a crane falling on a hapless pedestrian; a crazed executive wearing two-thirds of a three-piece suit; a pretty paralegal aide struggling with an on-the-job cocaine overdose; a trauma victim of an East River helicopter crash clinging to life. It's terrifying, tragic, triumphant ... and true.
Synopsis
Hundreds of people slam through its doors every day: gun-shot cops, battered kids, drug addicts, and suicides, destitute drunks, homeless people, AIDS sufferers, and accident victims. It's a bizarre parade of humanity looking for help — in the one place they know they can find it.
Welcome to the frontline trenches of medicine: the emergency room of the legendary Bellevue Hospital. Here, an army of doctors and nurses faces the onslaught of young and old, rich and ragged, sick and dying. All day, all night. All year. This is their story — an around-the-clock drama of the unexpected: a crane falling on a hapless pedestrian; a crazed executive wearing two-thirds of a three-piece suit; a pretty paralegal aide struggling with an on-the-job cocaine overdose; a trauma victim of an East River helicopter crash clinging to life. It's terrifying, tragic, triumphant ... and true.
Publishers Weekly
The emergency rooms at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospitalthe country's oldest municipal hospital, founded 250 years agotreat some 300 patients daily; three-fourths of the cases involve alcohol or drug abuse and a disproportionate number of the patients are paupers. It is a matter of pride for Goldfrank, director of the service, that no one is turned away, even as the department's resources are strained with indigent patients ``dumped'' from private clinics. With Reader's Digest editor Ziegler, Goldfrank and other Bellevue medical and housekeeping personnel recreate the somber, heroic, taxing work-a-day demands of saving lives under emergency conditions, including the lives of ``regulars'' like Eighth Street Eddie who needs to be deloused as well as treated and prisoners handcuffed to guards. The book is at once a social and medical document, overlong and, on occasion, tediously repetitious but gut-wrenching, heartwarming and instructive about the exigencies of this branch of medicine as practiced at the legendary institution. 25,000 first printing; $25,000 ad/promo; author tour. (September 2)