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Early Morning Rounds : A Portrait of a Hospital
Early Morning Rounds A Portrait of a Hospital Author:Burnham Holmes Long ago, a hospital was a place where travelers or the poor might find shelter. Today we think of a hospital as a place where ill or injured people receive treatment. But for medical students a hospital is a training ground, their first contact with practical medicine. These students have never set a bone, stitched a wound, se... more »en a baby born, or witnessed a person die. What do they experience when they come face to face with their first patient?
Told mostly in the words of doctors, students, and patients, Early Morning Rounds is the story of two students in their third year of medical school, a year spent in a hospital instead of a classroom. We follow them as they rotate through different areas of the hospital: the emergency room, internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and primary care. They learn to take a patient's medical history, give a thorough physical examination, make a diagnosis, take blood samples, and read an X-ray. They see both the speed in which an emergency arises and must be met, and the slow, painstaking accuracy of an operation. Students also learn something about the other side of medicine: A proposed merger might benefit the hospital financially but shut down some community facilities. And they must find their own answers to such questions as: Should a patient be taken off a respirator after brain death occurs? Should doctors practice preventive medicine? Are they becoming over-specialized?
This fascinating portrait reveals what it is like to be a doctor, a nurse, a student, or a patient. Burnham Holmes' vivid text and Janet Beller's striking photographs concentrate on a critical year in a medical student's life, a time of great strain but even greater exhilaration as students confront the issues and ideals which brought them to medicine.« less
Quick overview of general hospital specialties, aimed at student markets. Written in the early 1980s; some information about techniques and treatments is now outdated