The Blood of Strangers

Starred review from August 30, 1999
This haunting, exquisitely observed collection of medical vignettes is much more than a compilation of odd cases from the emergency room. Huyler probes beneath the surface to reveal the marrow of his encounters with patients, such as when, after making a swift diagnosis and saving a life, he later looks in on the patient and pauses to sit "in the dark for a while, watching the red and blue lights of the monitor, savoring him, taking something for myself." Inviting the reader behind the drape, he recounts his personal journey from his first days as a medical student in gross anatomy lab through the harder, lonelier days of his internship and residency before he finally stepped into the coveted role of attending physician, vested with full authority. With a poet's economy, Huyler dismantles the myth of the privileged doctor's life, revealing the long hours and loneliness that are too often requisites for the job. His character studies of the often quirky, sometimes tragic colleagues and patients who pass through the ward are quite poignant--from the murderer whose beating heart Huyler holds in his hands during a life-saving surgical procedure to the head of the trauma service who "looked remarkably like Lee Harvey Oswald" and seduced scads of nurses until one very efficiently took her revenge. Though this slim collection ends just as one has settled into it, it marks Huyler as a writer to watch.

September 1, 1999
Watch out! This book could make you miss your subway stop or an appointment. For Huyler is, besides a caring and skillful physician, a poet whose choice of words, conciseness, and feeling for rhythm draw one into the stories he tells. Most of them are only a few pages long and focus on a specific problem, relationship, or potentially disastrous medical outcome. Huyler's subjects range from the dying son who never quite fit into his family to the wife and mother thought to be alcoholic but who had Huntington's disease to a gangster for whom Huyler pulled the plug to a young child who had swallowed her grandmother's medicine. The stories illustrate Huyler's understanding of medicine and psychology as aids to humanity, not means to a physician's self-glorification. That Huyler loves his subjects becomes obvious as, in each story, the reader learns not only about emergency methods but also about the creative thinking needed to give each patient the best short-and long-term outcomes. ((Reviewed September 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)