The Blood of Strangers

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 Ihave seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories."