Life on the Line
Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The gripping account of six young doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19, an engrossing, eye-opening book in the tradition of both Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial and Scott Turow’s One L.
In March 2020, soon-to-graduate medical students in New York City were nervously awaiting “match day” when they would learn where they would begin their residencies. Only a week later, these young physicians learned that they would be sent to the front lines of the desperate battle to save lives as the coronavirus plunged the city into crisis.
Taking the Hippocratic Oath via Zoom, these new doctors were sent into iconic New York hospitals including Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicenters of the epicenter. In this powerful book, New York Times journalist Emma Goldberg offers an up-close portrait of six bright yet inexperienced health professionals, each of whom defies a stereotype about who gets to don a doctor’s white coat. Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members.
Woven together from in-depth interviews with the doctors, their notes, and Goldberg’s own extensive reporting, this page-turning narrative is an unforgettable depiction of a crisis unfolding in real time and a timeless and unique chronicle of the rite of passage of young doctors.
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New York Times reporter Goldberg debuts with a vivid and heart-wrenching portrayal of six doctors who graduated from medical school during the "first-wave peak" of Covid-19 in New York City. As the surge of cases "hit New York hospitals like a tsunami" in March and April 2020, some medical schools graduated fourth year students early so they could work at understaffed hospitals. Goldberg delves into the challenges her subjects, including the daughter of immigrants who practice traditional Chinese medicine and a young Hispanic woman raised by a single mother, faced as the health-care system failed to keep up with the demand for ventilators and personal protective equipment. Even Bellevue, one of America's "most storied" hospitals and the nation's leader in AIDS treatment, misjudged the threat: in January 2020, staffers were told that the "risk to New Yorkers is considered low." Goldberg also sketches the history of medical training in the U.S., noting that reform efforts in the early 20th century led to the closure of Black medical schools and the rise of programs "designed for exclusivity," and offers poignant scenes of her subjects coming to grips with the life and death nature of their work. This is a raw and emotional depiction of young professionals thrust into the middle of a crisis.
