cover image One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine

One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine

Brendan Reilly, M.D. Atria, $28 (464p) ISBN 978-1-4767-2629-8

He was chair of medicine at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, on which the hit TV show ER was based, and Reilly—now at New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center—matches the heart-pounding pace and drama of that fictional show in this remarkable memoir. Reilly painstakingly relates his most challenging cases, beginning in the present—when he sees 19 ER patients on an average day—before backtracking to his early career at Dartmouth in 1985. That year, Reilly struggled to identify the cause of an eccentric and lovable patient’s delirium. By the time he figured it out, the patient—Fred—had died. “[H]ealth providers still feel guilty when things go wrong,” Reilly notes of that troubling cold case, but he insists it made him a better doctor. After all, harm is inherent in the pathway to healing: “in a brave new post-Hippocratic world, medicine’s venerable first principle had become an empty shibboleth.... First, do no harm?... If we didn’t do harm, we couldn’t do good.” It’s a sobering reminder that though medicine is a science, it is not an exact one. Fast-forwarding to today, Reilly describes another wrenching struggle: making end-of-life decisions with his own elderly mother. But his book is about more than the joy of saving lives and the sadness of losing them—it’s an intimate exploration of modern medicine and the human condition. Agent: Janis A. Donnaud, Janis A. Donnaud and Associates. (Sept. 3)