492 - Book Club—Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER with Dr. Thomas Fisher
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some of the greatest societal inequities are evident in emergency rooms. ER physician Dr. Thomas Fisher, author of Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER, captures some of these moments during the COVID pandemic, illuminating the intimate relationship between doctors and patients. He talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about his book and about how health care—and ERs in particular—uphold systems of inequity even without intending to, and how providers can try to offer everyone coming through the doors the care they deserve.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:17.0 | and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore. |
| 0:19.7 | Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues. |
| 0:25.4 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.orgia. |
| 0:31.5 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:38.6 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call, and today we're back with |
| 0:43.3 | the Public Health On Call Book Club. Dr. Josh Sharfstein interviews Dr. Thomas Fisher, a Chicago |
| 0:49.5 | emergency room physician and the author of a new book on America's ongoing health crisis. Let's listen. |
| 0:57.7 | Dr. Thomas Fisher, thank you so much for coming to public health on call to talk about your book, |
| 1:03.3 | which is The Emergency, a year of healing and heartbreak in a Chicago ER. You wrote this as an emergency department physician during the COVID pandemic. |
| 1:17.1 | I did. Thanks for having me on, Josh. It's exciting to have this conversation. And you think back to |
| 1:22.9 | 2020 and when so many things were stripped away from us, from our ability to go to a restaurant and watch basketball games on TV or to spend time with friends in public spaces, that left a lot of time to do other things, which is included writing this book. |
| 1:41.5 | And the book is interesting because you both talk about what you see in front of you and what's behind what you see, and you illustrate your points with letters that you could write to the patients, for example, or others that you encounter. |
| 2:00.2 | Yeah, I wanted to do two things with this book. |
| 2:04.3 | One is bring the reader into the intimate special relationship between physicians and patients. |
| 2:13.5 | One that's really unique in society where people are sharing these moments that are just |
| 2:20.4 | very unusual and create a level of intimacy between strangers that's rare. It sort of reminds me of |
| 2:27.9 | something that happened about three weeks ago. I was taking care of an elderly person who |
| 2:33.1 | collapsed at home and suffered cardiac arrest. |
| 2:36.1 | They were transported to me in full arrest. |
| 2:38.7 | And while we had a couple of episodes of return of circulation, they ultimately died. |
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