Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality

Written by Pauline Chen

Narrated by Pauline W. Chen

When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she didn't count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her training, as she struggles to reconcile a shared humanity with her patients and to separate ideals about healing from a fierce desire to cure. Chen's transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live. Moving and provocative, informed equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoenix Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781614673149