INTERN by Doctor X. 404 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95."People think of surgery," writes the author, "as a grim, tense business with the surgeon snapping 'Scalpel!' and 'Clamp!' and everything going along in dramatic silence except for the click, click of instruments. This is just a lot of hogwash. About half the time the surgeon is telling dirty jokes with the fixed intent of embarrassing the scrub nurse. The rest of the time there is bickering, or gossip, or talk about how things were last winter ...

When I was a medical student, I worked with a doctor who lied. One day, she lied by ordering a kidney stone CT scan on a patient whom she thought had appendicitis. Let me explain. I was working in the emergency department with this physician Here was the rub: the type of CT scan used for possible appendicitis cases — a CT scan with contrast — is a time consuming process. The patient has to drink a container ...

"Paralyzed people fooled by a Super Bowl ad showing Christopher Reeve walking have been calling an advocacy group to find out how he was cured." --Associated Press, Feb. 1, 2000 I have long been reluctant to criticize Christopher Reeve. It is not easy attacking someone who suffered such a devastating injury and has carried on with spirit. Nor am I particularly keen to violate the Brotherhood of the Extremely Unlucky. But his Super Bowl ad was just too much. ...

Is it legally permissible and medically ethical to abort a woman for "psychiatric reasons"? In Britain, as in most countries, physicians and surgeons have addressed themselves diligently to this problem. Though far from unanimous in details, they have arrived at a clear consensus on the main point. The consensus: such an operation is very rarely justified.In Britain, abortion is legal only if performed to save the life of the mother, though by court interpretation this has been given a broad construction: "If pregnancy is likely to make ...

American soldiers often have a tough time with Arabic names, so to guards, he was just "Gus.'' To the world outside Abu Ghraib prison, he became an iconic figure, a naked, prostrate Iraqi prisoner crawling on the end of a leash held by Private Lynndie England, the pixyish Army Reserve clerk who posed in several of the infamous photographs that made the name Abu Ghraib synonymous with torture. Now, it emerges, there may be another dimension to Gus' story and ...

By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world. Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In 1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful ...

DOCTOR SAX —Jack Kerouac —Grove Press . The decade's most celebrated banger of mystical ashcans has written a fictional account of his childhood, and surprisingly, while the lad he describes is no Penrod, neither is he Little Boy Beat. Jack Duluoz, the author's alter-Kerouac, is exuberantly profane and comfortably delinquent—a kind of city-bound Tom Sawyer who at one point seems ready to go rafting down New England's flood-swollen Merrimack River on a henhouse roof. But like Sawyer, young Duluoz is ...

Mention the term "euthanasia," and the first thing most people think of is the epic assisted suicide battle of the 1990s starring Jack "Doctor Death" Kevorkian. But the issue of whether human beings — and more pointedly, doctors — have the right to help others die has been in the public discourse since before the birth of Christ. The Hippocratic Oath, which scholars estimate was written in the fourth century B.C., includes the unambiguous statement: I will ...

Patrick Swayze died patrick swayze died , patrick swayze, patrick swayze dead, patrick swayze death, patrick swayze dies, patrick swayze news Patrick Swayze, whose good looks and sympathetic performances in films such as "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost" made him a romantic idol to millions, died Monday. He was 57. Swayze died of pancreatic cancer, his publicist, Annett Wolf, told CNN. Swayze's doctor, Dr. George Fisher, revealed in early March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from the disease. "Patrick Swayze ...

Over this past week, I had some interesting conversations with colleagues who are also health care professionals. These conversations usually start with, "You know what I hate about the media ... ?" Now, over the past eight years, I have grown accustomed to being engaged in these sort of discussions where I am asked about everything the "media" have reported over the past few months, and asked to defend things point by point. It can be a challenging task. ...