About this event
This is a free event with limited seating reserve your tickets here: TICKETS
To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. In the recently published, Tornado of Life: A Doctor’s Journey Through Constraints and Creativity in the ER, physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness, and will speak about his book and his work at a free ticketed event at Ink Fish Books on November 10 at 6:30 p.m.
Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. Baruch shows how empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care.
Baruch works as Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he serves in the role of the director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration. A practicing ER physician, he is also the author of two books of short fiction published by Kent State University Press—What’s Left Out (2015) and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (2007). His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the New England Journal of Medicine, and on CNN.
Books will be available for purchase and the author will sign copies. Seating is limited. Securing your tickets in advance is recommended.
-- About Ink Fish Books --
Ink Fish Books is a woman-owned independent bookstore with a passion for books, food, and culture. Providing a friendly customer experience for browsing new and gently used books, we take pride in promoting locally made culinary products with our unique food and book pairings. Ink Fish Books supports local authors and makers by hosting special events, curating the Rhody Reader Box, and fostering collaborative community connections. Learn more at inkfishbooks.com