Book Review: "34 Patients" by Tom Templeton

I remember when I read a book called “When Breath Becomes Air” and was fascinated about the amount of hard work, love, care and courage that goes into being a doctor and even more so, being a doctor who then requires a doctor for a terminal illness that he himself will later succumb to. It started a fashion off for me to become fascinated with the stories of people who work some of the most intriguing jobs from doctors to architects and honestly, they require the person to know exactly what they are doing as mistakes are hardly ever permitted. Along the way, I have come into contact with many books about doctors and the treatment of illnesses with the books of Oliver Sacks being among the most famous that I have read. But, when this book caught my eye, I have to say that I was not immediately taken by it. In fact, it was more of a curiosity as I had never really read a book on this scale before in which the doctor basically gives us 34 very different patients to look at over the course of their career. Fascinated for a long, long while - I could not even begin to see what was to come in this grand memoir of being in the medical profession.

There is a lot to be celebrated about this book. We get given thirty-four patients and their stories. There are so many different types of people from a baby with a very rare disease in which they are almost always hungry, a man who disappears with a head tumour, a girl who is on holiday from her home country who suffers an extreme asthma attack and a young boy with Downs’ Syndrome who is the most heartwarming child you could ever read about. Each of these characters come from different backgrounds, they all come from different places and different cultures, occupations, ages etc. but the only thing that they all seem to have in common is that, for at least one time in their life, they are completely reliant on a doctor to keep them alive. It is a brilliant thing that Tom Templeton has done here, to show us his career through thirty-four different patients that he had to treat and it is written with such care and conduct that you can really believe that he truly loves his profession.

A gorgeously written book with moments of grief, sadness and moments of joy and comfort - we get the inside details on these very different people, each of whom have other people who are worried sick about them, each of whom seem to have some connection to family or friend who must explain things and each of whom come into some form of contact with our narrator either through assistance or treatment. Each story, though some are shorter than others, is valuable to learn about as the narrator gives us a key into investigating not only what is wrong with them at the time, but who they are as a human being and who is around them.

I enjoyed this book more than you can believe and I would highly recommend it to any kind of reader. A modern masterpiece of the memoir, this book has become one of my favourites of the year so far. It has brilliantly written emotions, amazing insights into humanity, moments of hope and healing and at its heart, a doctor trying to do his job and make things right again. Precision and excellence, this book seems to have it all covered when it comes to the spectrum of emotions one person can possibly feel.