The House of Hope and Fear

August 1, 2009
Youngs follow-up to What Patients Taught Me (2004) finds her still learning. Once she had the basics of medical practice down, she moved on to clinical training and eventually became an attending physician at Seattles Harborview Hospital, a county hospital whose annual charity caseload grew from $43 million to $112 million in just four years and that, until recently, had a policy of never closing its doors. No matter the emergency, no matter the Emergency Department or the Intensive Care Units load, no one was turned away. This in itself was a revelation, Young says, but it was the way all the patients were treated with courtesy and respect that inspired her to adopt a professional philosophy that embraced rather than shunned or tolerated the most indigent of walk-ins. This chronicle of some of the many cases she attended is equal parts memoir, plea for universal health care, and homage to the docs who mentored her tenure at Harborview.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)