Working Knights

Medicine is a profession of stories, emotions and lessons. A dying old man with dementia can suddenly become a reminder that every child will be old and helpless one day. An addled, anxiety-prone woman who thinks she is under a spell shows the goodness in everyone, as she constantly prays for her doctors and nurses. And a stupid drunk with a rattlesnake can be a lesson in natural selection. All of this and more appears in Working Knights, a new book about emergency medicine written by Edwin Leap, MD.

Dr. Leap is an emergency physician and writer who lives and practices in rural South Carolina. In Working Knights, he has taken his years of medical practice and combined them with a love of writing to produce a collection of observations and insights about doctors, patients and the practice of medicine. It isn't a collection of 'war stories' or tales of dramatic, life-saving heroics. But it is a candid look inside the mind of a physician. More, it's a series of honest discussions from a physician about the good and bad of his profession, about the wonder, dedication and madness of our modern medical culture, and about the lives of the patients who populate modern emergency rooms.

Besides looking at the humanity of medicine, Working Knights also speaks openly about many of the problems of modern medicine, hidden by so many professionals behind walls of political correctness. Medicine is full of roadblocks, like false expectations and insane regulations, that make it increasingly difficult to practice. In an age when we are trying to repair medicine from the top down, this book is a look at the problems from the bottom up; or as doctors like to say, 'from the trenches'.

Working Knights is a delightful contradiction. It is, in a way, the confessional of a doctor who has come of age. Sometimes funny, sometimes gentle, it is a conglomeration of the joys and frustrations of real practice, set far from the ivory towers of urban academic centers. It advocates compassion, both for patients and for doctors. And it brings the reader closer to humanity and closer to the truth about life behind the doors of the emergency room.