White Hot Light: Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine

Another “pitch-perfect book of short essays” (New York Times Book

Review) from the acclaimed author of Blood of Strangers, this one

exploring the contemporary practice of medicine from the perspective of a doctor

with 25 years of experience in the ER.

In the

late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning

memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a

series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an

instant classic.

Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from

the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits

visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of

medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.

From the doomed, like the Iraq vet with a brain full of shrapnel, to the

self-destructive, like the young woman who inserts a sewing needle into her

heart, to the transcendent, like the homeless Navajo artist whose sketches charm

the nurses, Huyler assembles a profound mosaic of human suffering and grace,

complemented by episodes from his personal life: the hail that fell the night

his wife gave birth, his drive through a snowstorm to see his father in a

Colorado ER, the beautiful wedding of his childhood friend with terminal cancer.

Melding hard-earned wisdom with a poet’s crystalline vision, Huyler evokes the

awesome burden of responsibility, the exhaustion, the relief of a costume disco

nurse party, and those rare occasions when the confluence of luck and science

yield, in the author’s words, “moments of breathtaking greatness.” 

White Hot Light offers an unforgettable portrait of a field that

illuminates society at its most vulnerable, and its most elemental.