Emergency

(Doubleday & Co., 1974)

Beneath the surface of the ground, as part of a modern hospital complex, there is a room. Each day an average of more than one hundred and twenty patients come to this room, ailing in body, or in mind, or in spirit, or in all three. For many the room has merely replaced the office of the family doctor. For others, the critically injured or ill, it has become, among the many rooms in which they have lived their lives, the most significant of all rooms, for some even the final room.

Emergency is the story of those whose lives are markedly affected by this room, those doctors and nurses and others whose function it is to staff the room and those patients whose fate it is to come to this room. In it the participants, in their own words, tell more than they themselves may realize of the tragedy, humor, motivations, frustrations, hopes and fears of their lives.

Some of the people you'll meet in Emergency

Frank Baker: The ambulance boss. His pride was in his own professional competence, and in his rig he called "The Great White Whale".

Arnold Henken: The teen-age orderly. A disarmingly perceptive commentator on the tragicomedy of life, he covered not only the Emergency Room but the whole hospital.

Verna L. Palmer, R.N.: The head nurse of the Emergency Room. Drawn to the profession by her own fear of sickness and death, she had now seen too much of both.

Thomas R. Hunter, M.D.: The chief of the Emergency Room. He had given up his general practice only to find that, although he could now control the pace of his life, he could never escape his emotional involvement with others.

David Stillman, M.D.: The psychiatrist. As he would have been the first to admit, he knew all the questions but only some of the answers.

Nicholas Braff: The jockey. He was one of the best, and then there was that spill and the fear and the secret with which he had no longer wanted to live.

Robert F. Mabry, M.D.: The chief neurosurgical resident. Born and reared in semi-poverty, and $26,000 in debt for his education, he was the consummate, confident surgical craftsman.

Bobby Carlton: The nightclub comic. He was in another bed in another "nowhere town," the pain growing but the gags still running while he tried to get a doctor.

Timothy J. Shea, S.J.: The Catholic chaplain. The comfort he had finally found for himself in the cloth he tried each day to share with the tragically ill and their families.