Dr. Richard Kessler tells what he's learned as a medical student, intern, resident, practicing physician, general surgeon, U.S. Army doctor, teacher, researcher and expert witness. This surgeon-professor dramatizes how he's used tragic malpractice case histories as teaching tools - showing medical students how to "Do No Harm" by avoiding preventable human errors and fatal mistakes. "Some Americans," he writes, "have been persuaded that most medical malpractice lawsuits are 'frivolous'-that they are without merit. If that were true, I would have had a hard time finding the cases I presented in my students. I did not. No deep research was required. I didn't have to go looking for horror stories. They came looking for me." General readers who find medical and legal journals daunting will turn these pages for the gripping stories and find them being educated painlessly along with Dr. Kessler's young students. They'll learn what questions to ask their doctors - and what kind of doctors to avoid - before it's too late.
RICHARD KESSLER, M.D., F.A.C.S., retired from the practice of medicine in 1995 after more than 30 years as a surgeon at the VA Hospital in Manhattan. He was also an attending surgeon at Bellevue Hospital. As a full professor at the NYU Medical School, he taught surgery and anatomy. After college, Dick Kessler spent a post-graduate year studying anatomy at the University of Toronto with Dr. J.C. Boileau Grant, a leading 20th Century anatomists whose "Grant's Atlas of Anatomy" is still a required text. Upon entering the medical school of McGill University in Montreal, he was asked to teach anatomy to his classmates because of his 400 hours of instruction from Dr. Grant. Though retired from the practice of medicine, he still teaches anatomy to first-year medical students at NYU. During his career, Dr. Kessler published 60 articles and abstracts in peer review journals, but he wanted this book to be read by people with no medical training. "Because of the confusion caused by the on-going debate about health care reform," he told his co-author, "I feel an obligation to tell what I have seen, heard, and learned first-hand over half-a-century as a medical student, an intern, a resident, a practicing physician, a general surgeon, a U.S. Army doctor, a teacher, a researcher and an expert witness in medical malpractice law suits." Co-author PATRICK TRESE has been writing professionally since college, mostly network news and documentaries for NBC News where he learned to translate complicated legal, political and scientific language into plain, readable English. During his 30 years at NBC, his writing and producing awards included a Peabody and several Emmys. His book about covering DEEP FREEZE II & III in Antarctica, "Penguins Have Square Eyes", was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1962. Caril, the story of Caril Ann Fugate, who became involved with mass-murderer Charles Starkweather and was convicted of first degree murder at age 15, was published by Lippincott in 1972. It was based on his NBC News documentary "Growing Up in Prison." He will soon publish a novel, "AMDG: An Ignatian Thriller".
