She tells her readers what it was like to live with a violent father who frequently beat her mother, and how she eventually left that home to attend Harvard and become an emergency room physician-but not without experiencing the crumbling of her marriage. She shows us, chapter by chapter, what it means to practice emergency medicine as both a Black doctor encountering racism and a person who has witnessed and survived terrible abuse. Michele Harper’s memoir challenges this one-dimensional portrait of physicians by excavating her own personal history, holding it up to the light, and pushing her readers to do the same. Though we tend to the vulnerable night and day, we physicians must find ways to suppress our own humanity and vulnerability while on the job. Yet I am keenly aware that my own humanity, in all of its beauty and brokenness, is not allowed in the rooms where I minister to patients and teach my colleagues how to balance a respect for personhood with invasive, painful ways of treating illness with medications and machines. As a writer and a palliative medicine physician myself, I help patients retain their humanity by helping them to articulate what matters most to them in the face of illness and death. We are chastised for being robotic or standoffish, yet our professionalism might be questioned if we cry in front of a colleague or patient. We are both expected to play God and admonished for thinking we are God. She adds that she hopes to give readers an insider’s glimpse into the demanding work of emergency medicine and show them its “center” (xii).Doctors inhabit a strange place in American society. Harper compares this to the Japanese practice of Kintsukuroi, in which artisans repair broken pottery by filling in the cracks with precious metals to highlight the beauty of the breaks. She reveals that she wrote the book during a season of “starting over” (xii) and contextualizes the book by framing it in her experience and credibility as someone who has been broken and rebuilt. She articulates her identity as not only a doctor but a survivor of domestic violence, a Black woman in a supposedly post-racial country, and a woman whose marriage ended just as her medical career was launching. She paints a clear, tangible picture of a typically chaotic day in the emergency room, where even in the chaos she finds the determination to do all she can to improve outcomes and save lives. She then opens with the image of a patient’s head in her hands, blood running down from his scalp into her gloves.
Harper quotes Hazrat Inayat Khan: “God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open” (xi).
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