Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (Vintage) | 
| Author: Pauline W. Chen
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $6.75
You Save: $7.20 (52%)
New (42) Used (19) from $6.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 19006
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 030727537X
Dewey Decimal Number: 609
EAN: 9780307275370
ASIN: 030727537X
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: great condition,in stock, shipped from VA ,lite shelf wear
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Product Description
A brilliant transplant surgeon brings compassion and narrative drama to the fearful reality that every doctor must face: the inevitability of mortality.
When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she could not predict was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, she found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox–that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education and practice as she struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate sense of empathy and humanity. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 Final Exam July 2, 2008
Very moving at times. The medical profession is a world of its own. Power is too concentrated. The education process is to dehumanizing. It's difficult for human beings to emerge from the process.
A Courageous Book May 4, 2008
This book is a call for doctors to provide comfort to patients when cures are no longer viable. She urges doctors to engage with persons as a complex, integrated whole rather than as an impersonal clinical case. The book is a heart felt philosophical argument against medical deconstructivism that illicits almost knee-jerk "do something" responds to illnesses. Complicated ritualistic processes or treatment algorithms focus on the disease rather than the person who suffers. Dr. Chen is amazingly courageous in writing this much needed book and she openly questions herself as well as the medical culture and educative process that "made her."
Wow. April 20, 2008
I picked up Final Exam from the "new" table while perusing a used bookstore. It spoke to me as I was struggling with the loss of a dear friend. While this dear friend was a canine, it brought to the surface the fact that I don't acknowledge one of life's most unavoidable truths very well.
To think that doctors didn't either both scared and enticed me into the impulse purchase.
Chen's writing is so adaptable, at once crisp and purposeful but never too cold or stale. From early on I was amazed at her openness and honesty, about a subject that clearly many of her counterparts would not appreciate as it would only call forward their own challenges and failings.
The prime element of handling mortality is woven through HER story which she presents with interesting detail about childhood, medical school and clinical training. Interwoven are brief intimate looks into the lives of some of her patients, and you come away from the book feeling more human and more educated.
A touching memoir April 8, 2008
Pauline Chen has written a touching memoir, one that captures the emotions of patients and their physicians that must confront their own mortality. From experiences with death as an adolescent to the daily experience of a transplant surgeon with life and death issues, Pauline beautifully captures her and her patient's emotions and courage with life threatening illnesses. This book should be required reading for all medical students and has a lot to offer for anyone interested in how physicians and their patients deal with life and death.
 Transplanting your liver March 24, 2008
Thoughtful and moving essays by a transplant surgeon with roots in Taiwan, which cut to the bone of death and dying, or morbidity and mortality as the docs may put it.
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