Burn Unit

I read a review of “Burn Unit” in Entertainment Weekly, and thought it sounded like just the kind of book for me.  Non-fiction, medical, with a nice mix of human drama and factual information.  Being about burns, I thought it might be a particularly intense book, and I was looking forward to reading it after EW gave it such a strong recommendation.  When I finally did read it, well, it was a bit of a snoozer.  Zzzzzzzzzzzz.  Like that.  There were some things that the author, Barbara Ravage, did very well.  The historical information about burn treatment was fascinating, and the details about modern burn treatment—skin grafts, artificial skin, etc.—gave me a lot of insight into the on-going damage a burn can inflict to the body, and why treatment for certain things, like types of chemical burns, is an effort in futility.  It was horrifying to know that even a small a burn with hydrofluoric acid (say, a burn which affects as little as 2.5% of your total body surface area) may kill you despite immediate medical attention.  Spooky stuff.  On the other hand, there were large portions of the book which were neither informative nor fascinating, and I almost quit reading half-way through.  When the author tries to relate the “human side” of burns, by interviewing burn victims and doctors/nurses in hospital burn units, the book turns into an episode of “Touched by an Angel”.  All the medical personal are bestowed with divine powers, all have super-human abilities, and all exude horribly cliched characteristics like “calm confidence”.  In the introduction to the book, the author explains she didn’t want to invade the privacy of the burn victims, so instead of writing exact accounts of what an individual endured during burn treatment, she has instead “consolidated” information about a number of different patients, and from that has constructed patients who supposedly reflect actual experiences yet are completely anonymous.  This technique really doesn’t work.  The people in the book have a flat, wooden quality to them, like characters on a bad TV show (hence the previous “Touched by An Angel” reference).  I was also really bothered by the fact that one of the burn victims was a gay man with an alcohol problem, and he also had deeply religious parents who didn’t accept his sexuality.  After being burned, the gay man gets his life together after he “finds God”, and I thought the entire story arc was offensive.  There was a point right after the man is burned and brought to the hospital, and his parents are giving the doctors his medical background.  The parents mention the son’s alcohol problem, but choose to not mention “his lifestyle”.  This is never followed-up in the book, and the son’s sexuality has nothing to do with why/how he was burned, so mentioning that he’s gay at all just seems like cheap gossip.  His parents don’t accept that their son is gay, their son is burned in a fire, he finds God, punishment duly noted.

So in summary, good information about burns and burn treatment, but not great character development.  If you want to really get inside the head of a burn victim, this book won’t help you.  I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone unless they enjoyed the Lifetime movie of the week, because that’s about as thought-provoking as it gets.  If you really want to know about the experiences of an average person working in the medical profession and coping as an average person might, I’d definitely suggest “Ambulance Girl” by Jane Stern.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/11 at 11:08 PM

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