Nobility in Small Things
A Surgeon's Path
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
His routine was the same every day for 38 years: up at 4:15, make a turkey-on-rye, drive the deserted Henry Hudson Parkway to the hospital, check the schedule, scrub, cut, reattach, save a life or two, repeat. Until March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shut hospital surgeries all over the world.
Craig Smith, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, went from performing heart surgeries on patients both everyday and celebrated (he performed the quadruple bypass that saved Bill Clinton’s life in 2004) to sitting in his tomb-quiet office looking out at George Washington Bridge. And he started to write. His Covid emails were balm to the staffers and later became celebrated for Dr. Smith’s care and thought in his assessment of the work of the hospital–of any hospital.
Nobility in Small Things not only takes us into the mind and soul of a surgeon with the ability to “play God” but into the heart of a man who chose a lifesaving career. The book introduces us to patients and peers, and moves from family-building and heartbreak at home, to the tragic suicide of two fellow M.D.s. Dr. Smith also writes vulnerably about his debilitating social anxiety and how he overcame it.
Dr. Smith shows us not just the making of a surgeon in Nobility in Small Things, but the maintenance of one: the deep feeling and moral philosophy that anchor the daily miracles that define his profession.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Columbia University surgeon Smith, whose daily email updates about Covid-19 went viral in 2020, debuts with a vivid, warts-and-all memoir. After college in the 1970s, Smith was aimless, halfheartedly entering and then leaving a graduate biology program at Dartmouth before finding work as a telephone lineman. Eventually, and despite submitting a bizarre personal statement about organ-playing, Smith was accepted to medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, which set him on a long path to becoming the chair of Columbia's surgery department. Smith documents his early struggles with winning self-deprecation ("My ignorance of botany was exceeded only by my indifference," he writes of being tapped to lead a botany lab at Dartmouth) that carries through to his descriptions of medical school, his early career successes, and eventually, his much-publicized 2004 open-heart surgery on former president Bill Clinton. Sections on Covid are graver, but never melodramatic, as Smith catalogs the devastation caused by federal mismanagement in the early months of the pandemic. He opens up about his personal life, too, discussing his lifelong panic attacks and recounting the still-unexplained death of his two-month-old daughter, Lydia, in 1983. It amounts to an occasionally humorous and always intriguing account of a life well-lived.
