Terrence Holt, Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at UNC, will be at Bull’s Head Bookshop in UNC Student Stores on Wednesday, November 5th at 3:30pm to read from his new book Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories.
“[Terrence Holt] is Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious.”—Junot Díaz
Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. “Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives,” Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.
Holt’s debut collection of short stories, In the Valley of the Kings, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as one of “those works of genius” that “will endure for as long as our hurt kind remains to require their truth.” Now he returns with Internal Medicine—a work based on his own experiences as a physician— offering an insider’s access to the long night of the hospital, where the intricacies of medical technology confront the mysteries of the human spirit.
In these stories, Internal Medicine captures the doctor’s struggle not only with sickness, suffering, and death but the fears and frailties each of us—patient and doctor alike—brings to the bedside. In a powerful alchemy of insight and compassion, Holt reveals how those vulnerabilities are the foundations of caring. Intensely realized, gently ironic, heartfelt and heartbreaking, Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human.
Also, check out Dr. Holt’s interview on Science Friday: ‘Internal Medicine’ Gives a Resident’s Eye View of the Hospital.
Terrence Holt is a Research Assistant Professor of Social Medicine, Clinical Assistant Professor of Geriatric Medicine, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature, all at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Bull’s Head Bookshop is located in UNC Student Stores on the campus of UNC-CH. All events at Bull’s Head are free and open to the public. Call 919-962-5060 for more details.