Cover of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures invites us into a world where the ordinary becomes the critical in a matter of seconds. A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today's doctors, patients, and hospitals.

Read more

Provocative, heartbreaking, and darkly humorous, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures introduces readers to a masterful new voice in fiction. A practicing ER physician, Vincent Lam delivers a precise and intimate portrait of the medical profession in his fiction debut. These twelve interwoven stories follow a group of young doctors as they move from the challenges of medical school to the intense world of emergency rooms, evacuation missions, and terrifying new viruses. Winner of the prestigious Giller Prize, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures marks the arrival of a deeply humane and preternaturally gifted writer.

Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri are the four ambitious protagonists of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. They fall in love as they study for their exams, face moral dilemmas as they split open cadavers, confront police who rough up their patients, and treat schizophrenics with pathologies similar to their own. In one harrowing story set amidst the 2003 SARS crisis, which the author witnessed firsthand, two of these doctors suddenly become the patients.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures invites us into a world where the ordinary becomes the critical in a matter of seconds. A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today's doctors, patients, and hospitals.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 368 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Hellgoing Shares short stories, canadian, fiction
  2. Light Lifting Shares short stories, canadian, fiction
  3. Whirl Away Shares short stories, canadian, fiction
  4. Dressing Up for the Carnival Shares short stories, fiction, canadian

“People who read Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Barnacle Love
  2. A Good House
  3. The Time In Between
  4. Open

“If you want more of the same (literary fiction about medical), start with these.”

  1. Kilter
  2. A Song for Nettie Johnson
  3. No Love Lost
  4. Seen Reading

“If it was the short stories that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Man Descending: Selected Stories
  2. This Cake is for the Party: Stories
  3. Dust to Dust
  4. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives
  2. On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency
  3. Silent Treatment
  4. Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors