Life on the Ground Floor - Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine

by James Maskalyk

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

362.18

Genres

Publication

Toronto ; Anchor Canada, 2018.

Description

Deeply personal in its scope, doctor and activist James Maskalyk--author of the highly acclaimed Six Months in Sudan--draws upon his experience treating patients in the world's emergency rooms. From Toronto to Addis Ababa, Cambodia to Bolivia, he discovers that although the cultures, resources and medical challenges of each hospital may differ, they are linked indelibly by the ground floor- the location of their emergency rooms. Here, on the ground floor, is where Dr. Maskalyk witnesses the story of "human aliveness"--our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it's here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member MaggieFlo

This is the story of the author’s work as an ER doctor in Toronto and as part of the Medecins sans frontieres in Somalia and Ethiopia. It is very much a tale of delivering medicine in the first world and in the developing world. He describes in stark contrasts the equipment and staff available to

assist him with trauma cases in the two vastly different environments. He writes proudly of educating the next generation of native born doctors who will hopefully stay to care for their fellow citizens.
Each chapter is a letter of the alphabet starting with A for Airway and ending with Z for zen end.
There is not a lot of personal detail here except for the visits with his elderly Ukrainian grandfather who lives by himself in a rural community.

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LibraryThing member vancouverdeb

Life on the Ground Floor by James Maskalyk is a 2019 Canada Reads Nominee. It is memoir of an emergency doctor who practices both at a large hospital in Toronto , as well as in a hospital in Addis Ababa. It was interesting to get an emergency doctors perspective of working in the ER, and comparing

a Toronto Hospital to a very basic hospital in Ethiopia. The memoir seemed very impersonal . I felt it really lacked in detail about Dr Maskalyk, as well as the patients he treated. It was a dry, distant read, and I certainly was not moved by it, which is the theme of Canada Reads for 2019. Perhaps an emergency doctor has to remain quite detached from his patients and that is the cause of the problem I found with this memoir. I can't see it progressing to the Canada Reads short list. I did watch Dr Maskalyk on you tube to get an idea of what he is like in person and he seemed more personable when speaking to a group of people.

3 stars.

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