Weekends at Bellevue / Julie Holland.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780553807660 (hc.)
- ISBN: 0553807668
- ISBN: 9780553386523 (pbk.)
- Physical Description: viii, 310 p. ; 25 cm.
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Bantam Books, c2009.
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- Baker & Taylor
Documents a psychiatrist's employment at New York City's Bellevue Hospital while sharing the life lessons she learned from her patients and colleagues, describing some of the more remarkable cases of her career, her friendship with a cancer-stricken mentor, and their influences on her family life. - Random House, Inc.
Julie Holland thought she knew what crazy was.
Then she came to Bellevue.
New York Cityâs Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, has a tradition of âserving the underservedâ that dates back to 1736. For nine eventful years, Dr. Holland was the weekend physician in charge of Bellevueâs psychiatric emergency room, a one-woman front line charged with assessing and treating some of the cityâs most vulnerable and troubled citizens, its forgotten and forsakenâand its criminally insane. Deciding who gets locked up and who gets talked down would be an awesome responsibility for most people. For Julie Holland, it was just another day at the office.
In an absorbing memoir laced with humor, Holland provides an unvarnished look at life in the psych ER, recounting stories from her vast case files that are alternately terrifying, tragically comic, and profoundly moving: the serial killer, the naked man barking like a dog in Times Square, the schizophrenic begging for an injection of club soda to quiet the voices in his head, the subway conductor who watched a young woman pushed into the path of his train. As Holland comes to understand, the degree to which someone can lose his or her mind is infinite, and each patientâs pain leaves a mark on her as wellâas does the cancer battle of a fellow doctor who is both her best friend and her most trusted mentor.
Writing with uncommon candor about her life both inside and outside the hospitalâher professional struggles, personal relationships, and the therapy sessions that help her crack the hard shell sheâs formed to keep the pain at bayâHolland supplies not only a page-turner with all the fast-paced immediacy of a TV medical drama but also a fascinating glimpse into the inner lives of doctors who struggle to maintain perspective in a world where sanity is in the eye of the beholder.