Direct Red

Name: Direct Red (eBook)
Brand: HarperCollins
SKU: 358968
Price: 13.99 USD
Availability: OnlineOnly

Direct Red

A Surgeon’s View of Her Life-or-Death Profession

Gabriel Weston

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Description

“What a terrific book….[Weston] leaves you feeling that if push came to shove you’d want to be operated on by her.”

—Nicholas Shakespeare, author of Bruce Chatwin: A Biography

The continuing popularity of doctor shows on TV—from Scrubs, House, and Grey’s Anatomy to the television phenomenon ER—indicates a widespread fascination with all things medical. Direct Red, by practicing ear, nose, and throat surgical specialist Gabriel Weston, takes readers behind the scenes and into the operating room for a fascinating look at what really goes on on the other side of the hospital doors. “A Surgeon’s View of her Life-and-Death Profession,” Weston’s Direct Red is written not only with knowledge and insight, but with compassion, honesty, and literary flair.

This collection of visceral and beautifully written essays explores the moments that define a surgeon:

Operating Room Stories: The heart-pounding tension between speed and competence, where a surgeon’s hesitation can be as fatal as a slip of the knife.
Life as a Surgeon: The paradoxical art of getting close to patients while maintaining the distance necessary to wield a scalpel, especially when faced with intimacy, sexuality, and fear.
Medical Ethics: The gray areas of a life-or-death profession, from the moral ambiguity of cosmetic procedures to the brutal choices made in the name of saving a life.
Doctor Memoir: A journey from a cocky medical student to a seasoned professional who understands that the greatest challenges are not always on the operating table, but in confronting one’s own ambition, fear, and humanity.

Genres

MedicalBiography & AutobiographyEssaysMedicalAll Other NonfictionSurgeryPersonal MemoirsNursingPhysiciansRich & FamousScience & TechnologyPoliticalCulinary

Released2009

LanguageEnglish

PublisherHarperCollins

ISBN9780061991134

SellerHarperCollins

About the author(s)

Educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, Gabriel Weston studied English literature at Edinburgh University before attending medical school in London. She went on to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and is a part-time ear, nose, and throat surgical specialist. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Reviews

“Gabriel Weston’s exactitude of expression is rare and uncanny, the more so for the sense one gets that this is a world in which the moral value of truthfulness is ambiguous. Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humor and beauty.” - Rachel Cusk, author of A Life’s Work

“Stark. . . . painfully vivid. . . . superbly honest. . . . A valuable and unflinching account, for all its grimness and gruesomeness, since it so clearly tells the truth.” - Christopher Hart, Sunday Times (London)

“Spare, arresting prose. . . . Weston is acutely aware…of the less than edifying transactions that sometimes occur between doctors and patients. She examines these with an honesty that is both brave and uncomfortable.” - Phil Whitaker, The Guardian (London)

“Concise, literate, truthful . . . moving. . . . As well-written and sensitive an account . . . of the glories and miseries of the practice of medicine as you are likely ever to read.” - Anthony Daniels, Literary Review (London)

“Compelling. . . . Dazzling. . . . A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance of expression heighted by both its clarity and economy…. The conflict between these opposing forces—personal and professional, female and male, patient and physician, pain and relief—makes Direct Red extraordinarily gripping.” - Elizabeth Day, The Observer (London)