Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story

by Gabriel Weston (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.22

  How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse. Direct Red won the 2010 PEN/ Ackerley Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $8.56

  There have been many books by surgeons but never one like this. The experiences those books describe are perhaps similar to those in Direct Red, but the telling of them is not. As well as being a surgeon, Gabriel Weston is a writer of extraordinary gifts and we are immensely fortunate to have her voice calm, compassionate, truthful telling us what it is like to stand in an operating theatre holding someone s neck open for seven hours, about the beauty of watching or performing fast, decisive cutting, about what happens when a doctor starts to have feelings about a patient and the line between the personal and the professional begins to blur, about the shame of watching a patient die. This, you feel, is the truth about what it it s like to be a surgeon in a big-city hospital in the twenty-first century. Mistakes are made, people especially young women surgeons are patronised, even abused, doctors fail to hear what patients are trying to tell them the doctors are not heroes, but flawed human beings doing something rather extraordinary in difficult circumstances. In Gabriel Weston s words it becomes possible to see each of these encounters, these interventions, the triumph

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $3.22

  How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? What happens when, on a quiet ward late at night, a patient you've grown close to lifts the corner of his blankets and invites you into his bed? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? In this startling and honest book, female surgeon Gabriel Weston allows light to fall on the questions we have all wanted to ask about surgery. As well as an experienced surgeon, she is a writer of arresting talent: her compassionate and insightful account achieves what many fear the surgical profession itself fails to do, combining a fierce sense of human dignity with the professional necessity for detachment. Direct Red is also unusual in telling the truth about what it is like to be a woman competing in a world dominated by Alpha males, in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century. She tells us what it is like to 'just go home and watch TV after acts that in a different setting could as easily point to the asylum'. This is a wise and humane book whose truths about human nature in extremis will stay with you.

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $12.10

  How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked as a surgeon in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse. Direct Red won the 2010 PEN/ Ackerley Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009.