Fifty Beating Wonders

Like When Breath Becomes Air, Being Mortal and The Emperor of All Maladies, Fifty Beating Wonders is a stunning book about the magnificent complexity of the human body and the miracle of being human. It is absorbing, uplifting, moving and celebratory - a wonder indeed.

The Emergency Department - loud, chaotic and heaving with broken bodies - seems an unlikely place to find marvelment. But what if there was a seam of joy, of wonder, of fascination running through it and all you had to do was notice? Because, sometimes, the antidote to trauma, to horror, is ... wonder.

Fifty Beating Wonders is a book about the marvels and majesty of the human body from the point of view of an Emergency Physician who has spent the past thirty-five years with her hands and her own heart dedicated to trying to fix those bodies when they come in broken. It is a book that travels into the emergency room and deep into the human body - and into the mind and the hands of one doctor trying to figure out why her heart is beating so fast every time she steps into that department.

Over the course of one shift, and one catastrophic motorcycle crash, Fifty Beating Wonders goes on a journey behind the battered doors of an inner-city emergency department and into the wonders of the astonishing human body, to discover that in every unsung, overlooked part of what makes us human, there is absurdity, marvel, awe and surprise.

This is a book about the human body. It's a book about when that body goes wrong. It's about the inestimable wonders of human pathology and the modern medicine that goes about trying to right it. But it's also about a life in emergency medicine, about inequity, about hope, about balance, about connectedness. It is a love-song to what makes us human and a polemic about how and why we fail. It's about joy, it's about what really happens inside the doors of a hospital, it's about failures, it's about triumphs. It is a book about the most wondrous question of all, what makes us human?

'A soaring work of incredible insight and elegance.' Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes

'What a remarkable book! Michelle Johnston walks a gleaming wire across a torrent of emergency room action and medical miracles, never once overbalancing. How a book can be both nurturing and breakneck I don't know, but apparently it can - because here it is.' Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Details

'This book of wonders throws up the curtain for us mortals to see our miraculous messy bodies and the deepest wishes and fears of those magicians that fix us.' Tim Rogers, Detours