The First Cell by Azra Raza7/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Good communication with patients, something that emerges repeatedly from these narratives, is such a rarity apparently all over the world. This is in fact the ability that gets lost as many of us go through medical schooling, and residency training, gradually losing our humanness. ![]() Her stress on differentiating disease from illness is particularly appealing. ![]() And the way she seamlessly weaves seemingly different disconnected human stories into each other, and into the science behind the failure, makes for gripping reading. It is the human factor that makes her struggle against cancer a very personal one for the reader. While Raza has a clear mission, that of advocating a fresh approach to the battle against cancer, and something she has been pursuing for a while despite significant opposition from her own oncology circles, the fact that she chose to embed her scientific pursuit into a very human plot poignantly brings out the urgency of her struggle. I cannot even imagine what Azra Raza must have gone through personally in putting to paper her own extremely private thoughts, and those of the contributors, who found the courage to share their immense pain with unknown readers through this narrative. I found the reading of “The First Cell” unnervingly disturbing, to the point that I had to put the book down periodically to let myself ‘recover’. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |