David W. Page

Every fall when NaNoWriMo comes around, I spend hours reading the forums. There are all kinds of interesting, bizarre and arcane queries, including many people searching for data on medical symptoms and treatment. It's difficult to write realistically without experience and that's the whole point of the Howdunit series.

Page spends quite a bit of time talking about the hospital itself - the trauma center, the doctors' pecking order, the ABCs of trauma and a diagram of an ER's trauma bay. Interesting stuff. However, it assumes that your character actually goes to the hospital. I was also interested in the symptoms/care of a field-treated wound and didn't get much data there. The book deals with injuries by system: head, abdominal, organs, extremities, etc and there's an index for quick searching.

Page gives many scenerios throughout the book detailing why it might be opportune for your resident to screw up this procedure or how your plot could go if your character had this injury, etc. In my case, I knew how my character became injured, I just wanted data to flesh out the scene. Sometimes I found his suggestions irritating and other times I found that his prompts actually did set my imagination in motion.

Bottom line: it's a decent reference, a good starting point, but you could be just as well off with Google or Wikipedia.… (mere)

The good news is that the book provides excellent information on all kinds of bodily trauma in a good mixture of layman's terms and medical jargon.

The bad news is that it could have been better and covered more topics.

I'm not talking about rare diseases or highly unusual circumstances. I'm talking about the fact that in the section about the chest trauma, there is nothing about heart attacks (but it addresses "cafe coronaries," which mimic heart attacks). The section about animal attacks discusses bite wounds from dogs to horses, but has nothing about claw attacks or trampling. The writing at times is awkward, too, and works too hard to hand ideas or scenarios directly to the reader. Um, no. I'm reading this to flesh out scenes already written. If I want writing prompts, I can find them here on my own (give the reader some credit!) or get a book specifically on prompts.

However, it's still an excellent resource books for writers of any genre or anyone who needs to understand some basic instances of trauma. I found the chapter on head trauma to be especially good for my own research purposes, but I littered the entire book with post-tab tab bookmarks for future reference. I thought the last chapter on organ transplants seemed unnecessary, but as I read it, I added a bookmark there, too. I'll be keeping this book in my library, with the hope that someday a new, more comprehensive (and less patronizing) edition will be released.… (mere)