The Blood of Strangers

Frank Huyler

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9780520262515
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520950726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician's encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare and elegant stories, Dr. Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine where small moments—the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter—interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors—a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seeking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a literary work that emerges from one of the most dramatic specialties of modern medicine. This deeply affecting first book has been described by one early reader as "the best doctor collection I have seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories."

Table of contents

• cover
• contents
• acknowledgments
• the unknown assailant
• prelude
• through the dark, softly
• faith
• black bag
• a good scar
• the engineer in the desert
• the invitation
• sunday morning
• the short arm of chromosome 4
• needle
• the dead lake
• the prisoner
• numbers and voices
• a difference of opinion
• the bleeding girl
• i’m driving
• burn
• the secret
• speaking in tongues
• power
• jaw
• the virgin
• sugar
• liar
• the bee sting
• the house in the wilderness
• time