Rising from the Flames: The Experience of the Severly Burned: The Experience of the Severely Burned - Softcover

"The book should be required reading for every clinician, medical student, social worker, and therapist who cares for injured patients, and especially for those who care for burned patients. It also should be made widely available in bookstores for anyone who has empathy for the ill and infirm or curiosity about burns."--Journal of the American Medical Association

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Books, Journals, New Media - January 6, 1999

Burns

Rising From the Flames: The Experience of the Severely Burned, by Albert Howard Carter III, and Jane Arbuckle Petro, 229 pp, with illus, paper, $23, ISBN 0-8122-1517-6, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

When I first received this book, the question arose as to whether it was sufficiently "medical" to review in a medical journal. After reading it, it is my opinion that the book should be required reading for every clinician, medical student, social worker, and therapist who cares for injured patients, and especially for those who care for burned patients. It also should be made widely available in bookstores for anyone who has empathy for the ill and infirm or curiosity about burns.

Most of the book summarizes the history and development of burn treatment with even more important and unique sections interspersed. These emphasize "the pain, the self-questioning, the monstrous appearance, the anger and despair, as well as the inner resources that somehow developed and held firm through the long ordeal" of severe burn injury. Unlike the usual treatise on burn treatment, the psychological and personal aspects of severe burns are emphasized. This is done by presenting case histories of individual patients, which incorporate the scientific background of the specific treatments rendered. Also summarized is the progress in burn treatment in recent times, begun by Dr Curtis Artz, Dr Truman Blocker, and the Shrine Temple of the Masons and continuing through the development of cultured-skin grafts.

Throughout the book, biblical and classical quotations, reproductions of famous art works, and stories from history and mythology are interwoven with scientific facts about burns, giving the reader, in fact, an eerie feeling. Burns as perceived in both art and literature, "the Napalm girl," and the self-immolations in Saigon during the Vietnam War are all discussed. The case of "Tim," a severely burned Jehovah's Witness, described in one chapter, is both a triumph and a tragedy. Those who care for burns understand only too well the euphoria of success followed by the bitter letdown of failure.

Clearly, burn injury exacts a high price. Rising From the Flames presents no moral discussion of the boundaries at which costs to society exceed value returned. Rather, the terrible psychological price exacted on those who are burned is vividly discussed, emphasized, and illustrated.

Rising From the Flames is a unique scholarly publication, a blended approach to burns, with material one would expect from an academic department of classics or philosophy and from a school of medicine. Once begun, one cannot put it down, carried along by a well-wrought structure and flowing, often beautiful prose, even for horrific injuries. The book is a high-quality, handsome, attention-grabbing volume. I am grateful to have been asked to review this unusual and interesting book about which there can be no controversy.

Martin S. Litwin, MD Tulane University Medical School New Orleans, La

(JAMA. 1999;281:88)

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