Noah Gordon "Doctors"

Title: The Doctors (orig. *The Death Committee*) Author: Noah Gordon Release date: 2006 Genre: Historical fiction Medical topic: surgery Description: The main characters of "The Death Committee" are three young medical students: Adam, Spurgeon, and Rafael, who begin their careers at an American hospital. At first glance, they seem completely different from one another, though this is only superficial. The author tells of their daily struggles with making life-saving decisions for patients, of workplace conflicts, of making moral choices, and the dilemmas that come with them. Severe medical cases, a diverse cast of characters and illnesses that must be diagnosed and treated as quickly as possible—these are scenes we recognize from contemporary TV series. Fortunately, the author takes a different approach; in this book, death, suffering, and real-life tragedies stare the reader straight in the face. Here, nothing unfolds beautifully and smoothly to satisfy the reader’s expectations. Quite the opposite (the so-called Death Committee, which investigates medical errors, makes a strong impression). Noah Gordon prepared thoroughly to write this book; as he writes in the preface, he consulted with doctors and visited hospitals. Someone might say: an American hospital is not a hospital in the proverbial backwater. Of course, the organizational and financial realities are different, but the moral dilemmas are the same. A slightly weaker element of the book are the doctors’ romantic subplots. One gets the impression that the author focused on them to avoid making a blunder in his depiction of the world. The book was published in a so-called pocket format, and that is exactly how it should be treated: as bedtime reading. However, anyone who would like to get a taste of the “medical world” will gladly delve into the pages of *Doctors*.