Battles of Life and Death

Psychiatrist and freelance journalist Hellerstein, son of a medical family, vividly and with considerable literary flair portrays the patients he treated during the stages of his internshipsurgery, neurology, etc.and his residency in psychiatry, which he chose as a specialty because ""facts give way to feelings.'' The author, a graduate of Stanford University Medical School, leaves unnamed his training hospitals. His ingrained faith in medicine was shaken by seeing cases in which patients died from side effects of treatments intended to cure them, and by his realization that, despite modern technology, on occasion illnesses could not be diagnosed until after death. Other hopeless cases, he notes, though correctly diagnosed, foiled the efforts of even the most skillful doctors. Almost unbearable are his accounts of burn victimsone of the most effective chapters in this story of the making of a physician. Literary Guild alternate. (March 21)