Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam

Vincent Lam is not your typical Can Lit darling. And although this literary debut garnered the Giller Prize in 2006, Lam does not spend his days in a coffee shop penning precious words. Rather he is an emergency room physician, who taps into his professional experiences and his memories of medical school to create this highly compelling collection of short stories.

I love short stories, but am sometimes left feeling that the story was simply too brief or that I have been cheated out of a deeper understanding of the characters by the brevity of the tale. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures is a book of interconnected short stories, and thus it is highly satisfying to see recurring characters surface in later stories. The stories, although not strictly chronological, do follow a timeline of sorts, as the characters age and advance in their professions. In How to Get into Medical School Part 1, the first story in the collection, we see Fitzgerald and Ming striving to pass their entrance exams. Their troubled relationship, as it evolves and crumbles through the years, forms the basis of these tales of the driven, intelligent and often very flawed people who inhabit these stories.

I found myself quite drawn to Fitzgerald and, despite some really horrible character flaws he eventually reveals, continued to root for his character throughout the book. It’s a sign of a well-written character, I think, who can continue to garner sympathy and affection from the reader, despite being revealed to be deeply flawed.

I highly recommend Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. Not only are the characters wonderfully rounded, but the underlying medical tales are fascinating and will appeal to anyone with an interest in the medical sciences. There is even a substantial glossary of medical terms at the end of the book.

Do read it!