By: Godwin, T.F.
ISBN: 978-0-88839-654-9
Binding: Trade Paper
Size: 8.5" X 5.5"
Pages: 368
Photos: 38
Illustrations: 15
Publication Date: 2009

PR Highlights: True medical stories explained in layman's terms
PHOTO Highlights: B&W and color pictures

Description: The author takes the reader through a totally frank and sometimes tumultuous career in medicine starting in his last year in high school to his forced retirement due to ill health more than forty years later. His career in retirement in the last twelve years, not far from medicine, has also been very interesting and described with insight and humour. In this book many very controversial topics have been raised as seen through the eyes of a busy doctor trying to do the best for his patients. Factual true life experiences describing the good and bad outcomes without hesitation. Vignettes of his patients have been weaved throughout the book, some to illustrate the general problems that are raised by their various illnesses. Some of the patients' histories have been changed slightly to avoid embarrassment but the names of his colleagues in medicine and their histories have not been adulterated in the slightest detail. The book is intended to both educate and entertain the audience and make the lay public more aware of the huge problems facing the profession today. His personal stories of his farm, his family and friends are sometimes both hilarious and heart warming but there are also some very serious moments. Some of the pit falls of being a doctor are described as well as some of their fool hardy adventures and hobbies. He also provides a short course in veterinarian medicine. The book is arranged in topics, each chapter being different from the preceding one and hopefully these chapters will provoke lively discussion.

Author Biography:

I graduated from high school, and started premed at the University of Toronto in 1955, and simultaneously joined the University Navy program (a naval offi cer-training program spread out over three years at the end of which the successful candidate received his commission in the Canadian Navy Reserve Force),
which helped to pay my tuition fees. I enrolled in medical school at the University of Toronto in 1958 and did a summer “externship” at Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital, Ontario in 1960, graduating from medical school in 1961. I then was a “junior” at the Toronto General for my first year of residency, and did my second year as a “senior” at Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver. My third year was at the Wellesley Hospital (technically, at the time, part of the Toronto General) again as a “senior.” My fourth year was at the Toronto General as a “fellow” under Ramsay Gunton. My fifth year was once more as a “senior” at the Toronto General, but by then a “senior” finally had a “junior,” basically a slave who was supposed to be working under us. At the end of this time (1966) I got my fellowship in internal medicine, which made me a specialist in medicine or a diagnostician. Basically I was learning more and more about less and less.
I then did another 18 months working in cardiology at the Toronto General Hospital under Doug Wigle, becoming an “invasive” cardiologist, before sett ing up a practice in cardiology in 1968 at the Royal Columbian Hospital on the West Coast of Canada. I started out as chief of cardiology in 1968. I was the only doctor in the department at that time, and remained chief of the department until I became chief of the medical staff for the two year term 1988–89. I retired from active medical practice in 1996.