The Surgeon Author:W. C. Heinze You are about to discover what it is to be a surgeon; what on human being feels when he saves-or loses-the life of another; what it is that drives a man to sacrifice the prime years of his life in pursuuit of training for a proffesion that is revered and, too often, misunderstood by millions. — In this novel you will accompany an eminent thoracic... more » surgeon on a journey through a period of somewhat less than a single day in his life. You will share Dr. Matthew Carter's thoughts as he hides the truth from a patient who will die within a week of inoperable cancer; you will feel his elevation at having succeeded in curing a young boy of a serious prenatal malformation; you will look on as he faces the acid test of a grueling three-hour operation during which, with a human life at stake,, his knowledge and his skills race against the minute hand of the operating room clock.
W. C. Heinz has written a novel that is as exciting, profound, and moving as it is precise in its wealth of intimate, exact detail. It is a minute-by-minute, inside picture of part of a day in the life of a great surgeon-from the moment he is awakened, at 6:45 A.M., to the conclusion of a harrowing bout with death, at 2:55 P.M. During this brief period he performs one simple operation and one extremely difficult one. He visits several patients in various stages of pre-operative recuperation. He relives, in his thoughts, some of the most thrilling-as well as routine-operations he has performed in the past. As the reader accompanies him, he comes to know and understand this surgeon's ambitions and fears, the significant events of his early life, the evolution of his religion, the development of his atttitude toward death and the origins and growth of his skills.« less