Word: nolen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MAKING OF A SURGEON by William A. Nolen, M.D. 269 pages. Random House...
Even the cockiest intern can lose his nerve the first time he cuts open a live human being. "It went horribly," admits Dr. William Nolen, recalling his own baptism, a routine appendectomy, at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital 17 years ago. "My knot-tying proficiency had melted away. My fingers, greasy with fat, simply would not perform. My ties slipped off the vessels, the sutures snapped in my fingers; at one point I even managed to tie the end of my rubber glove into the wound...
Fortunately, both doctor and patient survived. At 42, Nolen is now chief of surgery at Meeker County Hospital in Litchfield, Minn. But The Making of a Surgeon is no tale of easy triumph -or comfort to people headed for the hospital. The point of this impressively honest memoir is that surgeons learn by doing, and patients often suffer in the process. As Nolen tells it, trial and error is still the only way to develop the skill and gall that a first-rate surgeon requires...
Ring of Truth. Peeling off the surgical mask, Nolen reveals the semi-deity behind it as a bundle of human wiles and failings. In passages that entertain as well as shock, he tells how he and his colleagues frightened patients' families into giving blood-not to save their loved ones, but to fill the bank for others. He explains why so few patients were recorded as having died on the operating table: to avoid paper work, the doctors quietly sewed up the corpses and let them "die" after surgery...