Book description
In 1972, when the world around him was making little sense, David
Sklar left in his senior year of college to volunteer at a community
clinic in rural Mexico. With absolutely no medical experience beyond
being accepted to medical school at Stanford, Sklar literally learned
medicine by practicing it. With duties that ranged from suturing
wounds and delivering babies to digging latrines to pulling teeth, his
time at the clinic took him into the heart of a medical world that the
sterilized walls of the twentieth century would never have shown him.
The experience challenged his idealism and, ultimately, molded him
into a skilled emergency physician.
Years later, deeply immersed in the stress of running the ER at the
University of New Mexico Hospital and facing a divorce, Sklar decided
to revisit the Mexican village and clinic that provided inspiration
and grounding in the early stages of his career. Weaving together his
time in Mexico, his later career, and his marriage, Sklar's memoir
offers a thought-provoking meditation on the virtues of idealism in
the face of the inevitable failures that haunt all human endeavors.
David P. Sklar is associate dean of graduate medical education at the
University of New Mexico School of Medicine, and he served for many
years as the chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UNM Health
Sciences Center. This is his first book.
